Raid SSDs??

[Perrigrin]

So, I run a fairly crap computer to single box 5 accounts (1 graphics card, 2 screens) - Works ok except in big PVP battles, Dalaran and to an extent other capitals.

I will be upgrading it eventually, but debating putting in a SSD for OS+WoW as I believe that will improve my performance and it would move nicely over to the next computer, now I saw in another thread that you suggested raid0 two SSDs - Is that a significant performance win over just 1 SSD?

[Ozbert]

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.

[Perrigrin]

o, where would I do that? However, my system is a bit low on memory ... nm textures get loaded to vid mem, right? And that I got plenty off....

[Ozbert]

No, I think this is a texture cache in system RAM. If you're short on memory, it might not be a good idea to increase it.

It defaults to 32MB I think, and can be increased to 512MB. I can't remember the config variable at the moment, but an addon named TweakWoW will let you adjust it in game.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

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

[Jamesu]

Having an SSD will significantly reduce your load times but will have little effect on your overall performance. I can load a single instance of wow into dalaran in about 6 seconds compared to about 20s on the same system loading from the hd. Loading times into instances is basically instant. But like I say ssd will do very little if anything to improve your fps.

Do your homework not all SSD's are the same. Some of early cheap models (ocz, samsung) actually have lower real world performance than regular HD's. Intel M series and the OCZ vertex are two models that I know of that are good, there is a reason why they are $100 more than the rest. Don't bother with raid unless you got money to burn or won a lottery recently.

[Perrigrin]

In all situations, I see a improvement in lag once they system had a chance to "adopt" to the situation - However, there are areas where I am generally laggy - And I don't expect the HD change to improve that.

[Fef]

I moved from one single hard drive to one OCZ Vertex SSD (admittedly with a computer upgrade, so other parameters also changed). The "adaptation" phase when teleporting in Dalaran (worst case scenario, I think) was reduced from about a couple long and painful minutes to nothing (ok, make it a couple of barely noticeable seconds on rush hours).

Also, more RAM never hurts.

[Noids99]

The area where SSDs benefit over mechanical hdds for our purposes is primarily access times, random read speeds for small files and IOPS.

The ideal setup for a wow data drive is one with minimal access times with a good number of iops and transfer speeds for small texture files. Most SSDs will do this, but the Intel drives are still clear leaders in this respect. Some of the newer SSDs can perform better in sequential read/write situations, but these are not really important for WoW.

Raid 0 setups do not increase the number of IOPS or access times and depending on the controller and cache setup, can increase them slightly in some cases. They are very good at increasing sequential read and write speeds for all sizes of files, but less so for the smaller files than for larger ones. More importantly, they won't really improve random read/write speeds much over single drive setups.

So my recommendation would be to get an intel 80GB X-25M and try that in your system. It is likely there will be other bottlenecks also, but you can at least use this HDD in a new system you build in the future. Don't worry about using a raid setup at this stage as it will not provide much extra performance for WoW. The caveat here however is that if you are planning on using the SSD for your system drive, then a raid 0 SSD setup will be slightly faster.

Cheers

[waterval]

I'd say you can never go wrong moving to an ssd drive. as long as you keep it vertex or intel.

I got 2x OCZ vertex 30G for about 240 euro's and put them in raid 0.

I came from a single WD raptor which isnt shabby by any standard but the difference is still amazing, loading 6 instances of eq2 or changing zones is neigh to instant.

Only bottleneck i have now is the videocard. 8800GT was amzing value for money but i find myselve longing for sumthin new.

imho ocz vertex raid options are the current best value fer money. They might not be as amazing as the intel drives but you'l have more of them fer the same money. With a stripeset of 128k you wil still have double the io/s writing the smaller files as the smaller then stripe files will be written to 1 drive. (and with luck the reading if both the little files are on different drives)