Quote Originally Posted by 'Ozbert',index.php?page=Thread&postID=216972#post2 16972
I'd try increasing the size of WoW's texture cache first, so that it doesn't have to load textures from disk as often.

If that doesn't make any difference, then it's unlikely that changing your disk configuration will.
This is, at least partially, incorrect information. In big PVP battles, yes I could see that but it's much more likely to be that your graphics/CPU can't handle the effects lag, which has dick to do with texture memory (the more esoteric aspects of texture buffering are beyond the scope of this thread, lol).

Dalaran is a completely different situation as hardly anyone is casting spells, it's just that in Dalaran you're seeing so many "new" textures because there are so many "new" people in clipping range of you. ("New" meaning new textures being loaded into RAM for this session of WoW.)

So, of those two:
  • If you lag in big PVP battles even after you've been in range of most of the combatants for more than 30-60 seconds, it is NOT a problem with textures loading from disk. (unless, of course, your HDDs just purely suck. As in, old 5400RPM ATA33 drives. 8| ) This is most likely that your system cannot handle that many polygons/effects and you should reduce detail settings in wow or adjust quality/performance sliders in your graphics driver control panel.
  • If you lag in big PVP but only for the first 30-60 seconds and then it smooths out, a hard disk upgrade could drastically reduce the time it takes to smooth things out. Consider, though, that the improvement is relative. Examples: going from ATA133 drives to SATA-100 drives (non-raid) will yield about a 30% increase in disk load times. Going from SATA-100 to SATA-300 yields another 20% or so. Going from SATA-300 single to SATA-300 RAID0 (or other striped layout) will yield up to 60% improvements depending on the RAID controller. Going from SATA-300 to SSD drives can be anywhere from the same to 70% improvements, depending on how much money you have to burn as they are definitely not as consistently fast across brands the way basic SATA HDDs are. Going from SSD to SSD RAID0 is going to highly depend on your RAID controller, system bus speed/stability and system memory controller/speed. IMO, once you get to 10k RPM SATA-300 HDDs in RAID0, you're not going to benefit much for the money by switching to SSDs that will outperform them as you're talking $600US PER SSD at that performance level. Just my opinion, though I've had a bit of experience with all of the above.
  • If you lag in Dalaran or a high-pop Org/Ironforge, that also depends on how your system behaves. If it stabilizes and speeds up after a minute or so, that's pure disk loading textures. If it never speeds up and lags to hell 24/7 in Dalaran, you might see a slight improvement with a disk upgrade but you really need to look at CPU, graphics, detail settings and system optimization (like, what other junk are you running that can impede WoW, like a bunch of tabs in IE/Firefox or playing a DVD, etc.).
Hope this gives you some things to think about. You might be well served to characterize your lag situation a bit more in terms of the above so we can zero in on exactly where the bottleneck is.

Cheers,
Ugh