Multiple Hardrives?

[Rakadazan]

Should I add more HDs to my rig? Would it increase load times and some internal bottlenecks?

Maybe just 4 x 40GB HD for just wow clients and keep my 320GB for everything else?

Should it be in RAID?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Honestly, with only two clients, I can't see that you'd gain enough benefit to justify the cost.

Now, if cost is no object, by all means go grab some Raptor 10kRPM drives and throw 'em in a striped RAID. It ain't cheap, but it performs beautimously.

[Rakadazan]

Honestly, with only two clients, I can't see that you'd gain enough benefit to justify the cost.

Now, if cost is no object, by all means go grab some Raptor 10kRPM drives and throw 'em in a striped RAID. It ain't cheap, but it performs beautimously.

Oh i didnt specify in this post since i have been posting about my old 4400 you naturally assumed i was talking about that rig :thumbup: I was refering to my main gaming rig that is runnning 4 clients and was wondering if i could help that rig? YES those Raptor drives are vicious!!!!! :thumbsup:

[Djarid]

Raptors have great seek times but are their data throughput are matched by the big 1Tb disks such as the Hitachi.

Considering WOW does lots of reading from the massive .MPQ files I would imagine that the Gb/£ would make a larger 750Gb/1Tg disk a viable option.

[Havelcek]

I've had a lot of conversations with various folks on this forum on this topic and I think the best approach is to use a smaller number of fast drives with your WoW clients juntioned into the same install. On my new rig I am putting all of the OS and files on one Raptor 150gb 10K and all of my WoW clients juntioned on another Raptor 150gb 10K. When the Velociraptors come out later in the year I might split up the game files further but who knows.

[Maz]

Is disk speed really that important?

My main is on my desktop. It has a 7200rpm 3.5" hard drive, a 1.6GHz Dual Core processor and 1GB RAM.

My alts are on my laptop. It has a 5400rpm 2.5" hard drive, a 2.4GHz Dual Core processor and 3GB RAM.

My alts (four of them) load twice as fast as my main. The only difference between the two installs is that my main has about five addons (PitBull, Bartender3, Squeenix, ErrorMonster, cyCircled). Now I accept that those addons increase the amount loaded from disk, but not significantly. Despite having the slower hard disk, it's the PC with more memory and a faster processor that wins the race.

[Djarid]

Trinity Bars 2 > Bartender3 + cyCircled :D

sorry had to do it... I have become a self proclaimed trinity evangelist! ;)

back on topic I guess it depends on your bottle neck... in cities disk speed is definitely an issue.

Without doing testing it is a difficult one to call.

small fast disks with large cache in a stripe has to be the biggest win with the caveat that data on those disks is recoverable through other means

[Maz]

Trinity Bars 2 > Bartender3 + cyCircled

So it would seem.

I'm actually thinking of reverting to the default UI for bars. My X-Keys Pro has turned up and I'm tempted to stick everything on hidden bars and rely on the icons on the keys. I might try Trinity if I get tight on macro space but I want to spend more time playing and less time UIing.

[twobztwop]

I noticed yesterday Super Talent released a really cheap SSD 30gig Harddrive. It was like $300 at Newegg (it was available yesterday/back-ordered today though). I wonder how a drive like that would compare to a raptor/velociraptor? The specs list seq. read access at 120MB/s and write at only 40MB/s. It's definitely something I'd consider for my next build -- but only at a <$400 price point. (which I don't think is just wishful thinking -- I think these are going to be the next big thing and are going to get much cheaper(better?) in the next 6-12 months)

[Djarid]

A good RAID card would do wonders... a nice 256/512mb cache and RAID0 stripe mmmmmm

BTW hybrid drives should start appearing soon... physical disks with large (10+Gb) nvram caches