Single or Muli WOW dir's

[ahnubis]

i noticed a huge improvement in performance going from a 5 install to a 2 install

main char with all the addons in wow install 1

then my shamans with their own macros and addons in install 2

loading time on the 4 alts pretty much load in-game at the same exact time, my main lags a bit behind as there are more addons loading but it only takes a few seconds for the alts to load so its still pretty fast.

system is 2x200 7200 RPM in raid 0

[Havelcek]

Article on running Raptors in RAID 0:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

[Havelcek]

Best Buy currently has the 150gb Raptors on-sale retail-boxed for the same as NewEgg OEM.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1142294266684

[Djarid]

If I was not expecting my second child in 4 weeks, I would be sorely tempted (and they had them at the same price in europe)

[Havelcek]

If I was not expecting my second child in 4 weeks, I would be sorely tempted (and they had them at the same price in europe)

But you'll need something to store all those new pictures and videos on!

I picked up 2 for safe-keeping.

[Crucial]

Solid state hard disk ftw?

[Chorizotarian]

symbolic link[/url] on the data directory.

OK thanks. Now one more thing. Im very pc literate but have never heard of symbolic link. Any links or info on how to set that up

Thanks again for the help
:thumbsup:[/quote]

I wrote a script that might help you out:
[Other] PowerShell script to create symbolically linked (mklink) copies of WoW

[Fortis]

If I could get multiple disks, I would still go for single junctioned installs... here is my reasoning.

say I had 5 disks, I would have:
1x Disk - OS
4x Disks - stripe (RAID0)
I would backup essential data off the stripe onto the system disk.

Raid0 doesnt improve WOW performance much. WOW reads many small bits from its datafiles and repositioning/syncing the heads of 4 drives reduces the read performance. RAID0 is good for consecutive data transfer. I had a Raid0 with 4 Barracudadrives and was dissapointed....
For WOW I would suggest one dir and lots of RAM for caching.

[Ryan]

What's the main difference between having a single WoW directory and having two (one for main, one for clones). I currently run out of a single WoW directory and haven't really understood the benefits of going to two directories.

[Dorffo]

For me, the benefit of 2 directories is that I like to run my main instance with different config settings than my other 4 instances. That was the driving force for me to move to separate installs. I went with 5 originally then scaled back to 2 - one for my "main" and one directory for the other 4 (with lower settings etc).