Expensive way to reduce loading times

[valle2000]

My load time is already instant with 2x X-25 Intel SSD in Raid 0. Why bother with any other inane solutions?

Is raid really necessary or can I keep my main WoW on the harddrive and get a single SSD to put my other copies of WoW on?

[botboxer]

idea behind raid 0 is to push more data throughout the available bandwidth. you can do pretty much whatever you want so long as you are prepared to deal with the consequences. I don't recommend a tape drive for wow though no matter how much money you will win in a bet at work...... since ssd drives don't have large capacities, you will tend to keep all wows on same hd in a nonraid environment as syslinks don't work cross volume.

[valle2000]

My thought is buying one 80 GB SSD and then put all my four slave copies on that one and have nothing else on that drive.

[Igg]

My thought is buying one 80 GB SSD and then put all my four slave copies on that one and have nothing else on that drive.

That will work very well for you, At work I run 1 40gb intel V series drive (100 bucks) and that works pretty well with only wow on it.

At home I run the first gen 80gb in raid 0 resulting in 160gb for OS/wow and any other games/apps.

[Noids]

My thought is buying one 80 GB SSD and then put all my four slave copies on that one and have nothing else on that drive.

This might be a strange question but I'm not sure. I have been boxing for the last 2 years using the one install of WoW and just opening up 5 separate instances. It used to be slightly annoying to fill in details, but keyclone did this automatically for me and now with ISBoxer each character has a virtualised folder to store settings etc.

Is there any performance improvement available from having 5 separate WoW folders in fact? Interested in opinions.

Cheers

[valle2000]

This might be a strange question but I'm not sure. I have been boxing for the last 2 years using the one install of WoW and just opening up 5 separate instances. It used to be slightly annoying to fill in details, but keyclone did this automatically for me and now with ISBoxer each character has a virtualised folder to store settings etc.

Is there any performance improvement available from having 5 separate WoW folders in fact? Interested in opinions.

You need multiple folders if you want to use different settings for each WoW instance (resolution, key bindings etc). Five may be "overkill" in many cases, but I personally want to know I can fine-tune each instance exactly the way I want.
But in most cases I think at least two folders are recommended. One were your master is launched since you may want to use higher graphic settings in that one. One folder where all your slave instances are launched since graphic can be set lower on those.

Edit: However, have never used ISBoxer so maybe you can do the same there?

[MiRai]

This question has been answered many many many times before. Running multiple instances from separate folders hurts performance due to disk caching.

[valle2000]

But can you set e.g. graphics to very high on master and low on slaves without having separate folders? Or activate “click to move” on slaves while not having it on master? And can all instances have the correct wow-account by default at login screen, so only password is needed (which easily can be broadcasted to all instances at the same time).

(And no, I don’t want to adjust any of these manually after each launch).

[Ualaa]

If you're using IS Boxer, it virtualizes your config file.. so one install, can have different settings on a per character basis.

You could even virtualize other files, if you want a prominent focus frame for your pvp toons, but no focus frames for your other toons, and are using a unit frame addon which only saves the configuration on a per account basis.

[MiRai]

You would either need file virtualization or you would need to symlink certain folders to be able to have separate unique settings across multiple accounts. We're beginning to derail this topic by talking about software but, ISBoxer provides file virtualization [other software solutions may as well but I'm only familiar with ISBoxer at the moment]. ISBoxer can do any of which you asked about in your previous post.