Help me out please with a new system build..

[WhiteDragon]

Originally Posted by Zzyzxx71

I can't stress the value of this.

I run all my games off of a 64gb SSD - 1 wow in 1 folder for the driver, and 1 wow folder for the slaves, all 4 - my zone times are redonkulous.

SSD FTW.

couldn't u just take a few Sata II 3GB transport and stripe raid them to do the same thing? I say this bc a lot of people have a few drives laying around that they could do this with and save on not buying the SSD.

Or if you want REAL SPEED get a HD that you use RAM as the Drive space...This type of Hard drive is NOT known as your standard SSD drive..It has a read speed of 500 MB/s but has its own downfalls...16gb is as large as you can make it..
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[Ualaa]

A low end SSD, will cost you a hundred or less.
It will host the wow folder quite easily.

If you have a bunch of disks laying about, that's an option.

From the benchmarks I've seen, even a low end SSD has better read speeds, then say 4 raptors in raid 0.

[burningforce]

from what i read and my own playing on a raid, it had zero effect on Wow. Wow uses random read/writes, and when you raid drives, the sustained read/write becomes faster but random read/writes are the same. I saw an article/testing on tomshardware were someone did some testing on a raid drive against a ssd drive for games. the result was ssd was faster overall for random read/writes but slows down under sustained reading and writing. i'll try and dig up the article.

[WhiteDragon]

that makes seance. thanks for the info

[Ualaa]

The cheaper (generation 1) SSD's excel at read speed, which is 99% of what warcraft needs.

The much more expensive (generation 2) SSD's are even better for read speed, and can be written to many more times, but aren't really that much better then a Raptor for write speed, which is odd since the non-intel generation 1 SSD's kill the Raptor for write speed.

A fairly in depth write up can be found here: AnandTech: The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD