The Inner Circle

So, I run WoW on an Intel Core i7 2.6Ghz over clocked to 3.3Ghz with stock cooling. 6Gb of RAM, nVidia GX260 GPU. It runs like a dream when it’s loaded. But sometimes it does take some time to load. I had a theory that the loading time was purely HD, and with WoW being so big now it was probably hoping and seeking about the massive data stores it has.

The hard disk in this box is a Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 250Gb, I’ll admit it’s nothing special but it’s not completely crap.

I’d had a CF to SATA converter for a long time, I brought it from Deal Extreme thinking I’d have a use for it one day. One day at work while discussing WoW with a coworker I decided I’d try it out. So I brought a cheap-ish 32Gb (seeing as WoW is the best part of 17Gb now) CF card, in particular I brought the Kingston Elite x133 32Gb CF.

I read the reviews that seemed to warn that the CF to SATA converter was a bit rubbish and people were getting low speeds from it on the Deal Extreme website. But as I had already brought it, I had nothing to loose but to try it. So…

* Plug the CF card into the converter, mount in the PC with velcro and plug in.
* Format to NTFS and move the mount point in Windows 7 to c:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft
* Copy original WoW contents into new mount point.

I’ve done two tests so far… Starting WoW to Log In, Character Screen to Dalaran Appearance. I’ve repeated these results three times, reboots between each and disabled the windows prefetch/superfetch and search indexer.

WoW to Login:

Disk: 12.9, 9.7, 11.3
Flash: 8.3, 7.8, 7.9

These were taken with a stop watch, so add human reactions into them, but I’m sober and not on drugs, so they should be fairly similar. To be fair, let’s take the two lowest values of each, 9.7 on Disk, 7.8 on Flash. 1.9 Seconds difference. Not a lot to justify £55 but hey.

Character Screen to Dalaran:

Disk: 1:18.1, 1:17.3, 1:17.8
Flash: 32.1, 31.7, 34.3

Woooooow…. now that’s an improvement that can’t be explained by me failing to use a stop watch. It’s fast to load, things don’t seem to judder quite as much, people seem to appear quickly. It just seems more fluid.

I’m going to keep trying different tests to see what’s going on. Now note that I’ve seen 45Mb/s read off of this Harddisk, the maximum I’ve seen off of the CF card was 30Mb/s. So could I have been right? WoW really does benefit from a quick seek?

Obviously sooner or later the CF card will wear out, it’s not an industrial card and the constant rewrites of the NTFS allocation tables and additional resource data will ruin parts of the card. Although I understand most modern CF cards have a clever on chip system to distribute writes like that.

I’ll let you know as soon as I know more.

P.

EDIT: Interesting note is it seems to take longer to quit WoW now, I’m assuming has something to do with AddOn variable saving. I’ll investigate more in the morning.