Single or many WoW installs?

[Taipan]

Ok, I changed my 5 wow folders to 2 folders (on separate disks)

Well nearly... I deleted the DATA and Patches folders in 3 of my installations and used junction.exe to create reparse points instead.

WOW what an improvement in load times... previously my main would be waiting around for the clones to come online but now all 4 clones come online together a second or so before my main. A significant improvement.

Some of this performance increase must be down to the disk cache on the drive (8Mb on mine), as each client must be requesting the same information in a very similar timeframe the disk can probably service all 4 requests in a similar time to a single one. This prevents the head seeks that the drive would have had to do previously.

Greetings,

This sounds like a very interesting thing to try (I have a 10k raptor) but I'd really hate myself if I screw it completely and have to do a full 5 WoW installs + patches + Macro setups + Keyclone etc.

- @Djarid, my immediate question around Junction is : apart from saving disk space, is there any benefit in deleting Data and Patches files in previously used 3 folders ?
(the idea is to try with junction and if it doesnt deliver, just delete the junctions and immediatly go back to 5 directories).
I assume you wrote those Junction examples in the Wiki.

- @ all, 2nd question : how about going for Main on Raptor and 2 alts on 2nd Sata drive and 2 alts on 3rd Sata ?

- 3rd one : there are Sata 16Go SSD (Solid State drives) for under 300 Euros now while a typical WoW client is around 10Go (uncleaned).
Those claim access time about 100 times faster than most regular drives and most reviews seem to confirm a gigantic leap indeed.
Could this be the ultimate solution for 5 accounts -with Junction- while OS stays on Raptor ?

*already has the credit card in hand, ready to shoot*

/salute