Please suggest the most useful system upgrade...

[grap]

However, a 5 boxer will see a huge performance increase from moving from a single 7200 drive to even a slow SSD.

+1
yes you right

so we can explain again ...

if you havent enought memory ( ram and video ram ), your computer will play in the jam. swapp file will use all the time etc ....
except if you play in min ... 800X600 all low details with 1 screen.
So if you wish 3 big screens in 1920X1200 full details you ll need big memory too.

During the game, the only file to read is the wow data. it s small textures,cloths, etc ....
When you walk in dalaran, each new people connect will ask a short reading of this file .... so .... faster you can read this small wow data and faster your ips will be small ....

[d0z3rr]

I'd say hard drive access is the most discussed topic on the dual-boxing hardware forum. More than RAM, processor type, MB, and video card. You have many people claiming that the SSD has helped both their load screen times (from 30+ seconds with 5 toons in Dalaran to 2 seconds) as well as general game play (new textures, especially in highly populated areas, are being read in all the time while you move and other things move towards you). Between discussions of RAID0, SSDs in RAID, hard drive access, etc, I think you are definitely in the minority on thinking harddrive access time has little to do with multiboxing. After having enough RAM, many would say an SSD is the best upgrade your system can make.

How often do you boot your machine in comparison to how often do you see a load screen for WoW? I use my computer to primarily play video games so that question is very easy for me - I'd much rather wait an extra 15 seconds for my computer to boot using the 7200 drive and have my WoW loading screen be near instant. WoW is somewhat intensive on accessing the harddrive, but nothing big. A single player wouldn't really need an SSD. However, a 5 boxer will see a huge performance increase from moving from a single 7200 drive to even a slow SSD.

30+ seconds to 2 seconds? Of course there would be in increase there. Those people took the WoW folders and put them on a newly formatted non-defragmented space. Same exact improvement would have happened if they had just reformatted the drive it was on.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I 5 (used to 10) box on 7200 rpms drives and Dalaran loaded perfectly fine (30 seconds would be insanely long even for a 7200 rpm drive).

[daviddoran]

30+ seconds to 2 seconds? Of course there would be in increase there. Those people took the WoW folders and put them on a newly formatted non-defragmented space. Same exact improvement would have happened if they had just reformatted the drive it was on.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I 5 (used to 10) box on 7200 rpms drives and Dalaran loaded perfectly fine (30 seconds would be insanely long even for a 7200 rpm drive).

There's the key, driveS with SSD you dont need more than one. It also depends on the population size on your server, on a very active server, dalaran takes an extremely long time to load due to the sheer number of characters that stand around.

[d0z3rr]

All 10 of the WoW folders were on the one 7200 RPM drive, they then had symbolic links to a normal WoW folder on the same drive. It is also an 8mb cache drive, so I didn't even have them on my newer 1tb 16mb cache drive.