multiple wow installs

[bizcotti4]

hey ive seen people with more than one install of wow, is there a distinct advantage to this? i run 1 install for my 4 clients and i think its a bit slow. is having the computer access multiple directories more benificial than an all in one? thckx

[Saijyu]

it's more beneficial if you have them installed or symlinked to other hard drives because a hard drive can read 1 copy of wow faster than 4 copies, so it does improve your performance somewhat. unless i'm completely wrong on this but i don't think i am :thumbup:

[bizcotti4]

i thought the same way, and ive got my data folder on a ssd, but i just had 1 install and didnt know if that was the way to go or not.

[OogaJiggaWooga]

Best way to answer this, try both methods and see

[Saijyu]

if you have access to an SSD then i think you would benefit the most from putting the main install on that and then symlinking other installs to the other hard drives, i think that's what some people are doing, although somebody who has more knowledge about SSD's could help to provide there 0.02

[BobGnarly]

There is a tangible advantage to doing this.

There is a great deal of misconception, at least in my opinion, about how to improve loading/zoning performance in wow. A lot of people seem to think that spreading 5 installs across 5 disks would be the epitome of configurations since you can have a drive per installation. The problems are: a) you will generally access these in a serial fashion, losing much of the advantage that could be gained (parallelism), b) you lose per-disk caching, and c) you lose system level disk caching.

Emperical results: I saw a significant performance increase when I went from 5 directories to 2 (want a separate slave dir for graphics/performance settings) and symlinked everything but per-account settings and mods.

I do have a SSD, and I movec everything that I didn't want in common for ALL my wow installations to it. You don't, in general, want to put stuff on there that gets written to with any frequency because it is slower, and writes are largely what "wears" a SSD.

My advice: move to the smallest number of install directories that you can to support what you want and symlink the /data and other mostly static files to an SSD.