Performance boost from running off multiple hard drives (and video cards)?

Is there a performance boost having a hard drive for each character? My Mac has 4 docks and drives are cheap these days. I'm also thinking about if multiple video cards are better than one extremely powerful one. Would you rather have one of the best possible video card, or two of last generation's mid-range cards?

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Originally Posted by Fursphere

Multiple Hard Drives? Maybe - depends on how you config them.

Multiple video cards? Sure, you'll speed up the GPU processing time and instead slow down the main bus. (so the answer is in most cases, no) Although Macs may work differently than Windows machines in this ballpark - so I could be wrong.

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Yep, well I mean you have 5 clients of WoW running and each on its own hard drive (or maybe 2 sharing one in this case, since I have only 4 bays) I also have had issues of occasional corruption from running out of just one directory while boxing. It's infrequent, but when it happens it's a huge pain.

With the video cards, I already have 2, but I was wondering if upgrading to the best possible card would be better, or adding more cards. Like I could have up to 4 cards on my computer, and some of the last gen models are fairly cheap now. Or I could just add one super-powerful card, like one of those new ATIs.

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Originally Posted by TheBigBB

Yep, well I mean you have 5 clients of WoW running and each on its own hard drive (or maybe 2 sharing one in this case, since I have only 4 bays) I also have had issues of occasional corruption from running out of just one directory while boxing. It's infrequent, but when it happens it's a huge pain.

With the video cards, I already have 2, but I was wondering if upgrading to the best possible card would be better, or adding more cards. Like I could have up to 4 cards on my computer, and some of the last gen models are fairly cheap now. Or I could just add one super-powerful card, like one of those new ATIs.

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I have read some other multiboxers have noticed increases in performance using one extra drive just for wow. They did use SSD's, I am not sure if that takes care of the corruption problem but you can probably fit three of these in one bay so 4 should be no problem.

For windows it seems to depend a lot on the OS and drivers what will make for the best option when it comes to your question about the videocards. I am not sure how well Mac's handle multiple videocards. If adding one extra cards simply doubles your total framerate go for that because you'll be much better of financially. I am sure you can find more on this on the internet.

For me I run 5 WoWs from one install on a 32GB cheapo SSD (RiData MLC). It works like a charm.

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Originally Posted by Ess

I have read some other multiboxers have noticed increases in performance using one extra drive just for wow. They did use SSD's, I am not sure if that takes care of the corruption problem but you can probably fit three of these in one bay so 4 should be no problem.

For windows it seems to depend a lot on the OS and drivers what will make for the best option when it comes to your question about the videocards. I am not sure how well Mac's handle multiple videocards. If adding one extra cards simply doubles your total framerate go for that because you'll be much better of financially. I am sure you can find more on this on the internet.

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Thanks. It's really difficult to get answers that are relevant to not only multiboxing, but boxing on a Mac. Most discussion about performance revolves around just playing one game at a time, which is silly for me because there's no such thing as a game that could bring my computer to its knees if I were only running one instance of it.

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Originally Posted by Owltoid

For me I run 5 WoWs from one install on a 32GB cheapo SSD (RiData MLC). It works like a charm.

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Thanks for pointing out the SSD to me. I didn't even think of this as an option. The issue with running out of one folder for me was always that I'd rather have high settings on the main window and low on the others, and you can't do that with one folder. I guess having 4 SSDs would be ideal, but that'd be insane money.

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Originally Posted by TheBigBB

Thanks for pointing out the SSD to me. I didn't even think of this as an option. The issue with running out of one folder for me was always that I'd rather have high settings on the main window and low on the others, and you can't do that with one folder. I guess having 4 SSDs would be ideal, but that'd be insane money.

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You can always Symlink and have seperate WTF folders in each directory.

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Originally Posted by TheBigBB

Thanks for pointing out the SSD to me. I didn't even think of this as an option. The issue with running out of one folder for me was always that I'd rather have high settings on the main window and low on the others, and you can't do that with one folder. I guess having 4 SSDs would be ideal, but that'd be insane money.

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Your not gonna notice any performance increase from going one ssd and one copy of wow to going to 4 ssd and 4 copies of wow.
You would be better off getting one mid-high end ssd and symlinking.

Even going with one hard drive with one copy of wow would be better then 4 hard drives and 4 copies of wow due to how caching works.

Upgrading yer graphics card will do next to nothing due to the fact that wow does a good amount of the graphics on the cpu.

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Originally Posted by TheBigBB

Thanks. It's really difficult to get answers that are relevant to not only multiboxing, but boxing on a Mac. Most discussion about performance revolves around just playing one game at a time, which is silly for me because there's no such thing as a game that could bring my computer to its knees if I were only running one instance of it.

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Is that because all the good high graphics games are windows only? :D

I kid, I kid. I have a Mac too...well a Hackintosh...but it's just as good and a whole lot cheaper.