Hard drives...out of touch?

[DeludedGuy]

My 3xDMP10's dont seem that amazing..

Surely cant be worse than my 80gb Seagate IDE....can it?

[Nox]

You need a SATA 2 interface and a Hitachi T7K250 to get a decent speed jump.
Some of the reviews rate this drive as almost twice the performance of the Raptor.
I can't see that an adapter card would work though as it would be on the PCI bus which would limit the data throughput from the drive.

The only thing thats twice as fast on the hitachi is the sata 2 interface, and then its only capable of transfering double the bandwidth - neither drive approach the 150 mb/s bandwidth of a regular sata interface anyway, so its a bit irrelevant. However, the hitachi is almost as good in a lot of areas, and massive (in comparison)

Raptors don't make much noise, even the old 36gb ones aren't really that bad in a regular system (not a silent one!) the new 36 gb ones are much better, and the 72 gb ones better still (so i've read)

Nox

[rajagra]

Load times? What load times?

Ignore me. WoW is on my Raptor, not SCSI. It takes 20s to go into WoW, and 15-20s to "Enter World". I'd assumed that bit was time accessing the server, but now you mention it, loading from disk is more likely. Silly me!

[daverobev]

Ok put it like this..I got onboard IDE which is obviously gonna be bottlenecked by the mechanics of the drive.

I can put PCI IDE RAID, PCI SATA RAID, or PCI SATA non-raid in, but this is ALL gonna be on the PCI bus.

What is the upper limit of PCI? Because, from those who suggested IDE RAID, isn't that gonna be JUST as bottlenecked by the PCI bus? And SCSI...surely thats also gonna be on a PCI card (not getting a mobo with built in SCSI! Not this century, anyway )...so PCI can't be the bottleneck.

Raj I'm talking loading textures and so on when hearthing, switching zones, going somewhere where there are a lot of people...thats not server I don't think, its the HDD loading a bunch of stuff.

IMO a gig of RAM is enough (and as I have 2 slots with 512Mb I'm not likely to put more into this particular system), its not RE loading I'm worried about - stuff has to come off the HDD to begin with. System performance all round would be better with a faster HDD anyway.

So..I guess, one of the following:

a) don't bother, waste of cash
b) PCI SATA with Raptor (£150?)
c) PCI SATA raid with 2x Raptor (too much money, I think...£250+)
d) PCI IDE raid with 2x Seagate Barracudas (£150 ish? Not worried about capacity so much)
e) PCI onboard 300Gb Maxtor 7,200 RPM 16Mb cache (£120ish)

What is gonna get a noticeable bump in system loads (well, maybe..might put pagefile at least on that drive...but then WoW will be loading off the pagefile drive too..)? Thoughts? There's not much else going on the PCI bus at the moment.

[Butcher]

Ignore me. WoW is on my Raptor, not SCSI. It takes 20s to go into WoW, and 15-20s to "Enter World". I'd assumed that bit was time accessing the server, but now you mention it, loading from disk is more likely. Silly me!

Not sure, wow isn't noticably slower entering world on my laptop with it's crappy laptop drive than on my desktop with it's Atlas 15K II. In game performance is dog slow on the laptop, but that's more a gfx card issue.

One thing to check - if it's sluggish, try clearing out your savedvariables.lua file (in WTF\Account\AccountName). Parsing a few megs of lua seems to really kill loading and zoning times even on a fast machine.

[smelly]

i got 2GB ram and a 74GB raptor, makes no difference to me with loading speeds but then i had a RAID 0 before 2 maxtors 200gb. get more RAM much more beneficial

[SilentDeath]

Ok put it like this..I got onboard IDE which is obviously gonna be bottlenecked by the mechanics of the drive.

I can put PCI IDE RAID, PCI SATA RAID, or PCI SATA non-raid in, but this is ALL gonna be on the PCI bus.

What is the upper limit of PCI? Because, from those who suggested IDE RAID, isn't that gonna be JUST as bottlenecked by the PCI bus? And SCSI...surely thats also gonna be on a PCI card (not getting a mobo with built in SCSI! Not this century, anyway )...so PCI can't be the bottleneck.

Raj I'm talking loading textures and so on when hearthing, switching zones, going somewhere where there are a lot of people...thats not server I don't think, its the HDD loading a bunch of stuff.

IMO a gig of RAM is enough (and as I have 2 slots with 512Mb I'm not likely to put more into this particular system), its not RE loading I'm worried about - stuff has to come off the HDD to begin with. System performance all round would be better with a faster HDD anyway.

So..I guess, one of the following:

a) don't bother, waste of cash
b) PCI SATA with Raptor (£150?)
c) PCI SATA raid with 2x Raptor (too much money, I think...£250+)
d) PCI IDE raid with 2x Seagate Barracudas (£150 ish? Not worried about capacity so much)
e) PCI onboard 300Gb Maxtor 7,200 RPM 16Mb cache (£120ish)

What is gonna get a noticeable bump in system loads (well, maybe..might put pagefile at least on that drive...but then WoW will be loading off the pagefile drive too..)? Thoughts? There's not much else going on the PCI bus at the moment.

You have the same problem a I had with EQ2, both need 1.5gb+ of ram.

If you want to check, keep task manager open on performance tab, and every now and then check to see how much ram is used, and how much page file etc..

[daverobev]

You have the same problem a I had with EQ2, both need 1.5gb+ of ram.

If you want to check, keep task manager open on performance tab, and every now and then check to see how much ram is used, and how much page file etc..

Will do...I can see it hitting the HDD on loading areas though, and so I can't see how getting a faster HDD WON'T speed things up...it should be flushing RAM, not paging it out to the hard drive on loading new areas surely...and loading new stuff up, which by definition must come from HDD. Perhaps I am oversimplifying this?

For example last night there was a raid on Undercity...80 or more players in a single room (which is unusual, relatively), and you push the key to turn a bit, it "lags" for whatever reason, unlags and you are facing the opposite way...can't see how that is anything but HDD but I'll give it a shot!

Then when the HDD stops thrashing its all fine, you know? Performance is fine, just when going somewhere for the first time/when a bunch of stuff needs to be loaded it bogs down for a few (noticeable) seconds...

[Dark Horse]

Then when the HDD stops thrashing its all fine, you know? Performance is fine, just when going somewhere for the first time/when a bunch of stuff needs to be loaded it bogs down for a few (noticeable) seconds...

That would suggest to me you don't have enough ram as WoW has filled your ram up and has started to page to the hdd. I would say ram would get you a bigger performance increase although a faster hdd would help too

edit:
Have found some more info, check the performance guides here
http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-S...body_pagenum=1
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2381

[daverobev]

That would suggest to me you don't have enough ram as WoW has filled your ram up and has started to page to the hdd. I would say ram would get you a bigger performance increase although a faster hdd would help too

edit:
Have found some more info, check the performance guides here
http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-S...body_pagenum=1
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2381

Sorry but that doesn't add up..its the initial load when reaching an area. "Stuff" has to be loaded of HDD at some point. Its this I want to speed up, the initial loading of said stuff when I load a new area....RAM was sitting at about 600+Mb used, with near enough 400 free...pagefile wasn't changing. Game performance is fine, I...oh well I'll just have to suck it and see

[Dark Horse]

Another thing that will affect the load times is processor capability as it will have to deal with all of the compressed data on your hdd to put it into the ram. You haven't said anything about your processor but that would certainly effect load times.

Playing warcraft 3 at a lan party last year my 2500+m at 250x10 with 1gb of ocz el rev2 would load maps in say 10 secs while a friends xp1900+ with 256mb of ddr266 would take more like 30secs. Its not quite the same comparison as loading WoW but its along the same lines.

[SilentDeath]

Will do...I can see it hitting the HDD on loading areas though, and so I can't see how getting a faster HDD WON'T speed things up...it should be flushing RAM, not paging it out to the hard drive on loading new areas surely...and loading new stuff up, which by definition must come from HDD. Perhaps I am oversimplifying this?

For example last night there was a raid on Undercity...80 or more players in a single room (which is unusual, relatively), and you push the key to turn a bit, it "lags" for whatever reason, unlags and you are facing the opposite way...can't see how that is anything but HDD but I'll give it a shot!

Then when the HDD stops thrashing its all fine, you know? Performance is fine, just when going somewhere for the first time/when a bunch of stuff needs to be loaded it bogs down for a few (noticeable) seconds...

Firstly in MMORPG's very often you go back and forth between many different zones. Secondly the zones are HUGE and require a lot of ram.

A lot of the stuff from one zone, will be used in the next aswell. I think if you use taskmanager you will see that you really do need more ram.

In other types of games (fps, etc..) you hardly need any ram in comparason, becuase the levels are a lot smaller and with much less detail.

In your example, was the HDD going as it lags? if so that is becuase its paging it to disk (80 people = lots of ram!) and having to reload it. Once a zone is loaded the hdd should not need to go again once untill you get to the next zone
It should definatly not be going every few second, or when you do something (like start walking around).


As you only have two slots, I think just replacing one would be enough. If you put a 1gb stick in one, for a total of 1.5gb, that should be enough to make a very noticable difference.

[SilentDeath]

Another thing that will affect the load times is processor capability as it will have to deal with all of the compressed data on your hdd to put it into the ram. You haven't said anything about your processor but that would certainly effect load times.

Playing warcraft 3 at a lan party last year my 2500+m at 250x10 with 1gb of ocz el rev2 would load maps in say 10 secs while a friends xp1900+ with 256mb of ddr266 would take more like 30secs. Its not quite the same comparison as loading WoW but its along the same lines.

Warcraft 3 being a RTS? has very different demands to a MMORPG.
Faster processor will help, but is definatly not what is limiting him in this case.

Your example says more about the ram than the cpu anyway and with the same quantitys I think youd find load times with 5 secs of each other.

[Dark Horse]

Warcraft 3 being a RTS? has very different demands to a MMORPG.
Faster processor will help, but is definatly not what is limiting him in this case.

Your example says more about the ram than the cpu anyway and with the same quantitys I think youd find load times with 5 secs of each other.

I know its a different game genre and has different requirements but it is comparable in that this thread is about initial load times and so loading one game is much the same as another I would say.

Processor and ram aren't limiting but are a factor. I might swap some ram around next time i'm back and do some testing just to see what happens.

[rajagra]

One thing to check - if it's sluggish, try clearing out your savedvariables.lua file (in WTF\Account\AccountName). Parsing a few megs of lua seems to really kill loading and zoning times even on a fast machine.

But is 20s sluggish??? Nobody else has posted times for loading WoW that I can see.
I honestly didn't realise it was that long. Everything about WoW actually feels really fast, compared to, say, Half Life 2 Deathmatch which seems to take forever moving to a different area.