Best upgrade with current specs?

[southeastbeast]

So I have a bit of extra money (Happy New Years!) from the Lunar New year. Debating on buying 2x 80gb SATA HD's ($34 each) and stripe them for faster load times + upgrading to 4gb ram (currently have 2gb, $42 for the G.Skill 2x2gb) or saving for a new video card?

AMD 5000+ Black @ 3.0ghz
eVGA 9600 GT
2gb Corsair XMS 4-4-4-12 800mhz pc6400
1x Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm SATA 3.0gb/s HD


80gb SATA HD's
G.Skill 2x2gb

Thoughts? Opinions? I only really dual-box ATM, and load times are brutal and it's a bit choppy. I'm leaning towards the HD's+RAM. But a 4870 does sound good >;]

I will also be installing Windows7 64bit. If only Ventrilo wasn't such a pain in the ass to configure in Ubuntu and then getting the microphone to work, and multi-boxing in WoW seems slower than Vista. There was some recent news on the ATi drivers for Linux also... /tangent

[Owltoid]

look into an inexpensive SSD (solid state drive). If you can wait a couple weeks I'll give you my thoughts when mine comes in.

[-silencer-]

Order I'd upgrade:
2 GB of memory more (even 3.2GB on 32-bit will be an improvement over 2GB if you're trying for 3+ instances of WoW).
Small & cheap SSD (OCZ 30GB for under $100) instead of RAID 0 hard drives.
Faster videocard.. 4850/4870-1GB.

[southeastbeast]

Why an SSD over RAID? I understand that if I lose a single drive the whole array is lost, but for performance and lessen up load times I would imagine RAID has the clear advantage.

[southeastbeast]

Sequential Access - Read: 154.1 MB/s

Is this the stat I'm looking for in SSD's related to WoW load times? I thought SSD's don't write data contiguosly, but rather a random sequence because of the limited write cycles.

[southeastbeast]

Disregard
OCZ Core 64GB MLC SSD Review.. (Testing in progress..)

I found the review you wrote of the SSD. hehe. Thanks =D

[-silencer-]

OCZ Core 64GB MLC SSD Review.. (Testing in progress..)[/url]

I found the review you wrote of the SSD. hehe. Thanks =D

Yep, I've done various ways of running WoW, including RAID0 300GB Velociraptors, RAID0 36GB Raptors, RAID0 320GB 7200rpm, and an SSD. The key is the access time. An SSD can locate a file in 0.1-0.3ms, while the fastest Velociraptor is around 4.10ms. That's a huge difference when you're trying to locate hundreds of files on a drive. Just think of every piece of gear on every player in your local area when you visit a battleground or Dalaran - every piece of gear has textures and animations that have to be loaded. When you enter an area with 200 players, and each player has roughly 50 textures to load.. that's a sudden request for 10,000 files from your hard drive. These data files needed to be transferred aren't very large (evidenced by the comparatively ugly and pixellated textures), so the transfer rate doesn't matter at all as much as the access (seek) time.

My next step will be hosting WoW from Acard's ram drive with 16-32GB of memory.. which supports RAID0 from one Acard box. I'm positive this will be faster than any hard drive option short of a true main memory ram drive, but I don't want to take 12GB of space away from system memory to dedicate towards WoW, nor do I want to have to rebuild the ram drive after every reboot. Acard's unit has a battery backup - system ram drives don't.

[not5150]

If you get a decent SSD, you don't need to have them in Raid. A single drive will work just dandy.

I'm running an OCZ SSD in conjunction with a 7200 RPM HD. I load three WoWs from the SSD, while the other two load from the HD.

The difference is remarkable because the SSD WoWs load up so much faster than the other two windows. If I run into Dalaran, the SSD-based characters follow, while the others will lose follow.

You can run the same test if you get an SSD. Keep one WoW folder on your HD and pop the other one on the SSD.

[-silencer-]

If you get a decent SSD, you don't need to have them in Raid. A single drive will work just dandy.

I'm running an OCZ SSD in conjunction with a 7200 RPM HD. I load three WoWs from the SSD, while the other two load from the HD.

The difference is remarkable because the SSD WoWs load up so much faster than the other two windows. If I run into Dalaran, the SSD-based characters follow, while the others will lose follow.

You can run the same test if you get an SSD. Keep one WoW folder on your HD and pop the other one on the SSD.

Why don't you make all your WoW directories on the 7200 drive, then just symlink to one WoW/data directory on the SSD? That's what I did when testing the SSD months ago with one 7200 drive, and it was the best config on a budget.

[not5150]

Because I'm lazy