Running 5x from 1 WoW folder, or...?

[Otlecs]

i use 1 folder for main on main hard drive and 1 folder for slaves on 2nd hard drive. I have 0 crashes and good loading times/fps.

This is the best setup, and the one I finally settled on.

I went the "one folder per concurrent instance of WoW" route for a while, but the above approach provides quicker loading times and less maintenance.

[Lorune]

I personally run everything of 1 folder, this is on a fast Sata Drive. I also tried loading it once from my IDE storage disk however this noticable slowed down things, both loadtimes as fps.

[Anozireth]

Currently I'm running my main on a two-drive RAID-0 array (which is also where the system swap file is), and a pair of clones on each of two more drives. This seems to be optimal for my 4 drive setup. I had been running my swap file on the same drive as two of the clones, but noticed greater load lag on those two than the rest. After moving it to the RAID array, I saw a great improvement on those two with no noticeable difference on my main.

Edit: I wanted to also add, you should NEVER use more than one folder per drive due to caching. If you only have one drive, all 5 from one folder is the only way to go.

[Anozireth]

Another note, if you must have multiple folders with only one drive so your clones can run a different WoW configuration, you can use junction points or symbolic links (depending on XP or Vista respectively) to point the data folders to the same place and only have one copy of the data. The data is the bulk of the disk usage, both in terms of activity and storage, so it will save you space and speed you up.

[Nixi]

1 folder for main, [ie. d:\wow1\] and 1 folder for alts [ie. d:\wow2\] It's best if you can put them on different hard drives- Main [d:\wow1\] Alts [e:\wow2\] . I found a tremendous performance increase (and less maintainence) from going from 5 installs to only 2. My second largest jump in performance came with windows 64 bit reading all 4 gigs of my ram, then I jammed another 4 gigs for a total of 8 just to make sure ram wasn't an issue anymore. (as a side note, i plugged in two 8800 GT's for 0 performance gain and I ended up taking the 2nd video card out to build another machine.) The other benefit in going with 2 installs is that your mains folder can be used as the 'solo' play folder for all your other toons. So your keybindings and things can be more logical and orderly since you're just using one class.

Question to those that run 5 wow's from 1 drive. How do you deal with the sound setting? I want my 4 alts to have the sound off and my main to have the sound on, when I run 5 copies from 1 directory the sound settings will someitmes get screwed up. I think it has to do with the last copy of wow that I close and it saves the setting, but it's annoying to constantly have to readjust that.

[puppychow]

I have five wow folders, \wow1 - \wow5. Wow1 is the only "real" install, all the rest are junction'd off \wow1. One thing I did was NOT junction the WTF folder, but instead the WTF\Account folder. That gives each Wow folder its own wtf\config.wtf, which lets me give each one different video, audio, etc settings and they stick.

The script I use (XP, not sure about Vista) to create extra wow dirs is pretty simple and copied from a script previously posted here:

 
@echo off 
set MYDIR=%1 
mkdir %MYDIR% 
FOR /f %%I IN ('dir /b /a:-d wow1') DO ( 
echo %%I 
fsutil hardlink create %MYDIR%\%%I wow1\%%I 
) 
junction %MYDIR%\Cache wow1\Cache 
junction %MYDIR%\Data wow1\Data 
junction %MYDIR%\Errors wow1\Errors 
junction %MYDIR%\Logs wow1\Logs 
junction %MYDIR%\Patches wow1\Patches 
junction %MYDIR%\Screenshots wow1\Screenshots 
junction %MYDIR%\Fonts wow1\Fonts 
mkdir WTF 
junction %MYDIR%\WTF\Account wow1\WTF\Account 
mkdir %MYDIR%\Interface 
mkdir %MYDIR%\Interface\AddOns 
junction %MYDIR%\Interface\AddOns wow1\Interface\AddOns

Run this from the root of the drive you are creating new wow's in (or change all the wow1\ to c:\wow1\ or whatever).

One thing to be extra careful for when doing this though is never, ever, ever delete a file inside any of the wow2, wow3, etc folders. it WILL delete the wow1 equivalent! I accidently deleted my Addons folder once and didn't realize it, fortunately I had made a backup the night before.

[Narezza]

I had originally made 5 separate directories for my 5 accounts, but I'm new at this and had a very frustrating time getting the settings and macros set for each account. So, Im now running everything from one account and having a much better time. Im not noticing any memory problems or a slowdown of any type.

I guess it depends on how beefy the computer is. If you've got a big enough pipe, then you should be able to run it all from one directory without any problems. If you cant, or experience some slowdown or crashes, then put them in separate directories and link them.

[Meathead]

I run my wow all in 1 folder 60 frames everywere but only on ok graphics my 4870 is kinda lagging but all in all its still good