Solid State Drives (SSDs) and WoW Muliboxing
Solid State Drives (SSDs)
Index:
I. Need for faster hard drives and WoW
II. Intro to SSDs and a note of caution
III. Price Shopping
IV. Remaining Issues
Hopefully a little background information for some of you looking at picking up a SSD. I have a few questions throughout that I’d like some solid answers on too if anyone can help.
I. Need for faster hard drives and WoW
*skip this section if you already know why we needed faster hard drives for multiboxing
The old standard recommendation for multiboxers (multiple instances of WoW on one PC) was to get a few hard drives and split your WoW folders across the separate drives. The reasoning was pretty obvious. When you first start WoW, your PC needs to load a lot of the game into memory, hence the loading screen when you first start. Two WoW folders on the same drive isn’t too bad, but you’ll notice that the loading screen takes twice as long, if not 2.5x times as long. When you are playing the game and running/riding from zone to zone, WoW is pretty good about loading the new zone into memory as you go. But when you do a major change, like hearthing, portals or just taking the blimp/boat ride, then the game needs to load the new zone all at once and you’ll get the loading screen again.
With multi-boxing this isn’t just a matter of the load screen taking longer – it can actually make the game unplayable. When I first started multi-boxing with 3 accounts I’d hop on the blimp from Org to UC and I’d get the loading screen (Indiana Jones-like map) on a 3 screens. Then about 5 min later, while I was still waiting for the map to tell me I was at the new stage and I could get off the blimp – the map would switch and tell me that I was on the way back to where I started. It would go back and forth like this every few minutes as my PC couldn’t load 3 copies of the new zone faster than it took the blimp to head back and forth. I'd never even be able to get off the blimp. I learned to only put 2 chars on the blimp at one time, until I eventually got a 2nd hard drive and some more RAM.
Even if you get around the problem I had with blimp rides, you’ll get similar issues just on a much smaller scale when you’re playing. The hard drive will have to load multiple copies of some file all at once – if it can’t do this fast enough you may get some lag or stutter when playing. So we all learned to split up our WoW folders so that we’d get better response from our hard drives.
Pulling some numbers out of thin air – lets say every instance of WoW needs to load 1GB of information from your hard drive into RAM. Lets also say that any given hard drive can load 1GB of information in 1 min. So if you have 5 copies of WoW on the same hard drive and they all need to load this information at once – it will take 5 min. But if you install 2 more hard drives (OS and 1 install on hard drive A; 2 WoW installs on hard drive B, and 2 more WoW installs on hard drive C), then it will only take you 2 min to load the same amount of information.
II. Intro to SSD’s and a note of caution
I’ve been patiently following the reviews on SSDs for some time. The benefits look great – there’s reviews of people claiming to boot windows in under 10 seconds. Using our above example, lets say that an SSD could load 10GB of information in 1 min (10x faster than our old hard drives). So instead of taking 2 min to load all 5 installs, now we can do it only 30 seconds. So instead of buying lots of separate hard drives, we just buy 1 (maybe 2) SSD’s and get even better performance. Sounds great – but of course SSDs are expensive.
As soon as I started to see prices dropping, I was ready to jump in with both feet, but then I saw articles like these.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
and
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535
If you haven’t read them – I’d highly recommend the read. The short version is that a lot of people were buying a lot of cheap SSDs and getting very disappointed. The culprit was determined to be cheap memory controllers that performed terribly when it came to random write performance. Your OS spends a good deal of it’s time doing random writes, so if you bought one of the mass market SSDs you’d end up with all kinds of stutter just running windows. This problem doesn’t appear until the drive has been used for some time. People were seeing performance on random writes at something like 1/10th the speed of a standard 7200 RPM disk drive.
There was only 1 brand that did a really good job tweaking its controller for random write performance – Intel. Those drives were originally crazy expensive. OCZ came out with their Vertex brand of drives that had a good-enough memory controller. Since then a lot of companies have switched to improved memory controllers, but many of the cheap ones are still in the market. It can be very difficult to tell which memory controller any specific dive may actually use just by looking at the brand.
But I have to ask – how does this impact WoW and multi-boxing? I would guess (although I’ve never verified) that WoW, even in a multi-box environment, doesn’t do a lot of random writes to the hard drive. For a dedicated WoW drive (OS running somewhere else), do we need to be concerned with anything other than large block sequential reads? Is a cheap SSD with a cheap memory controller better than a bunch of regular disk drives?
This is really a bang-for-your-buck sort of question. In a perfect world, we’d all go buy a separate Intel SSD for every installation of WoW and RAID a few more together for your OS. But most of us can’t (won’t) spend that much on hard drives. So where is the point of diminishing returns?
The jury may still be out on whether these cheap memory controller SSDs are all we really need so long as our OS is on a separate hard drive. But for those of you that multi-box a little bit on your laptops or anyone limited to only 1 hard drive, make sure you get a drive with both good read and random write speeds.
Here's what I'm planning on getting
Here's what I'm planning on getting
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227462
120GB OCZ Agility SSD - $300. I'll play around with it and my current 2 hard drives for a bit to see how it works best. (I currently have an older 320 GB drive - 7200 RPM, 8MB cache and a new 1TB drive - 7200 RPM, 32MB cache.) I'm guessing that I'll be best off by putting my OS and all 5 WoW installs on the SSD.
