optimal HD setup, I only play one game and do nothing else.......

optimal HD setup, I only play one game and do nothing else.......

with the exception of browse the web.

So I play World Of Warcraft and do nothing else with my rig. I sometimes browse the webb with it, but even right now im on my back up rig just to post this thread. I know, kinda extreme.

So right now I got an old maxtor 20g HD. I plan to upgrade soon..(another thread, dont know what im getting yet)

Would my game run faster if I setup on my new HD alone and left my os how it is on my old hd?

Or ditch the old hd and put everything on my new setup?

Raid, If I go raid, can I setup raid as a secondary drive and still use my old hd as primary?

kinda confusing, thx for reading.

==Pak

The best way to store stuff is to buy 2 hard drives - one to store your operating system/other apps, and another to store data (like your documents, videos, music, etc.).

I'm guessing your old drive is probably a 5400 RPM (maybe 7200, but not likely) 2 mb cache hard drive. I would not install WOW or Windows on that. Buy a newer hard drive and put your OS and WOW on that... use the extra drive for extra storage.

As for RAID, I would not advise it in your case. Others will probably disagree with me, but it would have very little effect on loading times... and if you use RAID-0 there's risk involved: if you lose one hard drive, you lose ALL your data... not worth it IMO.

As for a new drive, I would recommend anything from Seagate (it all depends on how much storage you want). I have also heard nothing but good things from the latest Maxtor drives with 16mb of cache. Of course if speed is your fancy (and cost isn't an issue), take a look at the 74 GB Western Digital Raptor...



EDIT: to the forums, if you haven't been welcomed already!

I wouldnt get any performance gains by running WOW on a HD alone?

space is not an issue and honestly my OS and other apps load just fine to me.

I just want WOW to run as best possible.

--pak

Well I remember in beta, WOW didn't take much time to load. Remember most things from it are loaded into ram, and run from there unless you have a small amount of ram (512mb or lower with typical games of today).

Truely if you want more preformace upgrade the harddrive and use the current one as backup/storage. You'll see a nice preformance boost in with most of today's modern drives compared to the old 20gig you got.

If you do get a new drive make sure you transfer everything over to the new one. Not only will it help load WOW faster (thats if it can really load faster then it currently is) but everything else will also. Usually in today's computers harddrives are the bottleneck in preformance, when loading things.

Nice! Fellow WoWer!

Maybe I can be a bit more specific now.

The reason I suspect my HD being the culprit is because when I lag, my HD light is on. Not to mention that when I bought this new rig, the only thing I didnt upgrade was my HD.

Now if you remeber WoW or maybe you still play, my lag is when I land from the gryphon, hearth to IF, walk to IF, and pretty much anytime there are a lot of player characters around. If there arent many player characters around and I do any of those i just mentioned, IM fine. It just seems to lag a lot when I have to load a lot of player character models, and like I mentioned the HD light is on. Any time I lag infact, my hd light is on.

so Im guessing HD.

Again, I only use my rig to play WoW. I do not DL music or movies or play any other games. My os and current apps I use all load fine to me. All I want is OPTIMAL performance when playing WoW. I just assumed to my self that if I install WoW on a HD alone that it would run faster. Just makes sense to me. But you all seem to think it would be better to run my OS and WoW together on the new HD, I will do so.

TIA
--Pak

Well from system specs, it would be the HDD slowing you down. My only thought is that if the games using up more ram then you got swaping it to the slow drive could slow it down considerably too.

But I'd say get a new harddrive and that should help out. If you watch for local sales in stores you can usually get a 80gig 7200RPM 8MB cache drive for $30 or under sometimes. Or just go to an online retailer and nab one.

The only reason why I was saying put OS/Game/Apps on the same newer drive is due to the old drive being slow, if you had 2 equal preforming drives, then I'd say put the game on teh secondary drive.