III. Price Shopping

Looking at my current WoW folders they are all between 15 and 16GB in size for a WOLK install. I’ve never really looked to how much can be cleaned up from these. Anyone have a significantly smaller or larger WoW folder? I’d also plan on leaving at least a little room for new patches, maybe even the next expansion. Unless someone knows of a good way to shrink this folder, I’d say we’re looking at 20-25GB depending how much room we want to leave for future growth.

Size of Windows installs also very greatly. I just installed Windows 7 release candidate (64-bit version) and I remember it saying I needed at least 20 GB of hard drive space. Even if you want to have a dedicated machine to WoW multiboxing, I’d suggest you leave some more room for your OS and a few essential programs (web browser, ventrillo, keyclone, etc).

Going back to standard hard drives, this isn’t much of an issue at all. There’s basically no price difference between 80GB, 160GB and 320GB drives – you can pretty much take your pick for $50. A good rule of thumb for standard hard drives is never to allow your hard drive to get more that 50% full. After that it starts slowing down. By the time you get to 75% full, you may only be at ½ the speed of a mostly empty drive. But even with the smaller hard drives from a few years ago - space isn't really an issue.

SSDs don’t have that same limitation, but of course they come in much smaller sizes and with bigger price tags. You can even pretty safely plan on filling them up 90% full without performance issues. It’s probably not realistic to get 2 WoW installs on a 32GB drive. Currently I’m seeing prices from $100-$200 for 32GB drives, so it’s just not real price competitive anyway when compared to 64GB drives,

Doing a quick check on Newegg.com for 64+GB drives came up with the following:

The cheapest entry level (inferior memory controller) 64GB drive is selling for $130 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820139006
The cheapest “good enough” memory controller 64GB SSD is $196 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820609393
The Intel mainstream 80GB drive is sold out at $305 – http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167005
Finally the Intel extreme edition 64GB drive is $670 – http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167014

Pretty big price difference there between the top and bottom. I’d guess that we’d all agree the Intel Extreme drive is overkill for WoW. It’s designed for things like enterprise network file share and webservers, etc. But there’s still a big gap between $130 and $305.

When we jump up to the 120+GB sized drive here’s what I see at Newegg.com:

The cheap drives (inferior memory controller) start at $240 for 128GB – http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820139007
The cheapest “good enough” memory controller 120GB SSD is $300 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227462
The mainstream Intel 160GB SSDs are sold out again, but were at $600 – http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820167015
Finally there’s an SLC SSD (think Intel Extreme Edition clone) 120GB SSD that’s sold out for $1,300 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227443

Intel is supposed to have their 2nd generation drives available soon, and at a lower cost (closer to $225 - 80GB & $440 – 160GB). But they’ve supposedly been out for a week now and I’m not seeing them in stock anywhere. Hopefully all the prices will drop a bit once the Intel drives are on the streets. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=3607&p=1

If you’ve been following the memory controller issus – these are the only recommended SSDs for running an OS on.


Drive Controller The Same As
Intel X25-M Intel N/A
Patriot Torqx Indilinx Barefoot (MLC) Corsair Extreme Series X128, G.Skill Falcon, OCZ Vertex, SuperTalent UltraDrive ME
OCZ Agility Indilinx Barefoot (non Samsung MLC) N/A
OCZ Vertex EX Indilinx Barefoot (SLC) SuperTalent UltraDrive LE
OCZ Summit Samsung RBB (MLC) Corsair Performance Series P256


I can’t find these new Intel drives in stock anywhere – but here’s where pricing is supposed to end up.

Drive NAND Capacity Cost per GB Price
Intel X25-M (34nm) 80GB $2.81 $225
Intel X25-M (34nm) 160GB $2.75 $440
OCZ Vertex (Indilinx) 64GB $3.41 $218
OCZ Vertex (Indilinx) 128GB $3.00 $385
Patriot Torqx (Indilinx) 64GB $3.48 $223
Patriot Torqx (Indilinx) 128GB $2.85 $365
OCZ Agility (Indilinx, non-Samsung Flash) 64GB $2.77 $177
OCZ Agility (Indilinx, non-Samsung Flash) 128GB $2.57 $329
OCZ Summit (Samsung) 128GB $3.04 $389


All of these drives and the other models based on them, use the inferior memory controllers are NOT SUITABLE to run as your primary drive

JMicron JMF602B Based SSDs
G.Skill FM-25S2
G.Skill Titan
OCZ Apex
OCZ Core V2
OCZ Solid
Patriot Warp
SuperTalent MasterDrive



IV. Remaining Issues

RAID and SSDs? Some SSDs do support RAIDing them together. Some do not. Even of those that support it, make sure it works with the raid controller that you plan to use.

For the purposes of WoW multiboxing, RAIDing a bunch of SSDs together is probably overkill. You could probably pick up one of the good 128-160GB SSDs and put 5 WoW installs on it along with your OS and a few other programs and still get better results than someone running with 5 good 7200RPM hard drives all RAIDed together. But I don’t actually have any benchmarks with either of these, so if someone does I’d love to see a comparison.

Multiple SSDs? There is still some benefit from limiting the number of WoW installs on one physical hard drive. But I would consider it overkill to try to pick up a series of 32GB SSDs and only put one copy of WoW on each drive. Again I don’t have any benchmarks to prove or disprove my point so if anyone has some in-game comparisons between multiple installs on 1 SSD vs separate SSDs – please let us know.

Benefits of having your OS (or at least your swap file) on an SSD? This is my biggest question at the moment. I know that even with more than the required amount of RAM (8-12GB) your OS will still attempt to write some information to your swap file. Some people can successfully eliminate your swap file, but that does cause errors with some programs. Keeping your OS and swap file on an SSD should speed that function up dramatically

SSDs as weak substitute for RAM? Say you are 5-boxing and you run to Dalaran, which is very RAM intensive. If you don’t have enough physical RAM your PC will write information to your “virtual memory” – which is a protected folder on your hard drive. Doing this to and from a SSD is obviously much faster than a tradition hard drive. But it is still much slower than reading/writing to RAM. But for those looking to squeeze the most of out of an older 32-bit system that is capped at 3.5/4GB of RAM; is upgrading to an SSD a better bang-for-your-buck than buying a new 64-bit OS and more RAM? I can see either one costing about $300, but I’m not sure which you should upgrade first.