Quote Originally Posted by 'Arryth',index.php?page=Thread&postID=108098#post1 08098
Found something weird :thumbup: ......... Raising my slider on the object draw distence in the game video options, actually slightly improves my lag in Shattrah...... I will keep running around in the city to see if it continues.
I just read the thread from the beginning for the first time, and your last statement is what I've been thinking all along. It's probably the hard drives. Yes, RAID0 has faster transfer rates than a single drive. But it is NO faster in random read access times. WoW, in cities especially, has to very frequently find (access time) and load (transfer rate) hundreds of very small files for terrain and object polygons and textures. By expanding the object draw distance, I suspect that it's increasing the radius at which it keeps these objects/textures in memory, reducing the amount of hard drive accesses that need to be made if other players come and go into your "object draw distance."

Even 10k rpm drives in a RAID0 array can be too slow (notably access times) for the amount of thrashing that goes on in a busy Shatt. I ordered a 32GB SSD this morning, so hopefully next week I'll be able to test the performance improvement of putting the WoW/data folder on a solid state disk with access times around 0.3ms (as opposed to the top-line Velociraptor's ~4-5ms). If it is a noticeable improvement, I'll order another and an Areca PCI-x1 RAID controller and RAID0 them.. then get a feel for how WoW handles random reads on nearly-instant random reads with transfer rates higher than a Velociraptor.