External HD and Warcraft

D

Dr Moonunit

New Member
So, i've been running World of Warcraft on my laptop for three years now and I have both expansions on there. All together it takes up close to 16 GB's. My laptop handles it just fine but I only have 3 GB's left, it's a 80 GB HD.

I've already figured out that I can put it on an External. I read plenty of posts about size but I want to know about the cache and RPM's of it all. I figured an 80 GB External HD will be plenty but what about cache size if i'm running USB 2.0? Any suggestions for under $125?
 
Dr Moonunit said:
So, i've been running World of Warcraft on my laptop for three years now and I have both expansions on there. All together it takes up close to 16 GB's. My laptop handles it just fine but I only have 3 GB's left, it's a 80 GB HD.

I've already figured out that I can put it on an External. I read plenty of posts about size but I want to know about the cache and RPM's of it all. I figured an 80 GB External HD will be plenty but what about cache size if i'm running USB 2.0? Any suggestions for under $125?
Click to expand...

It won't work. I have tried before and was hitting at most 10fps on lowest. In cities it was 2-3fps max. This was on a laptop that (at the time, before I got my rig now) was better than the system I normally played, which did medium at 40+fps.

why can't you back other stuff onto the external hdd, such as files, music and other programs that don't require the speeds that games do (even though WoW isn't very demanding at all, it still uses considerably more than a word processor or media player would)
 
I have heard it works ok, a friend of mine has even raided while running WoW off of his iPod. I would suggest going eSata if your board supports it though.
 
Cromewell said:
I have heard it works ok, a friend of mine has even raided while running WoW off of his iPod. I would suggest going eSata if your board supports it though.
Click to expand...

I will copy my WoW files over to my external HDD (it is a different and better one to the one I last used to try it) and will see how it works on my system now and post up some info on what I am getting.

=EDIT=

What you are about to see is someone eat their own words.

I was completely wrong, the performance isn't that of what I have when playing from my hard drive (full settings @ 60fps always), but it is so easily playable.



I should point out loads times are substantially slower, but that is to be expected, and also I only have vanilla and BC installed, no wotlk because I don't like it. If I still had my second copy of WoW installed on my system (I had wotlk and BC) I'd test that too to show what wotlk is like, but I highly doubt the difference would be that great

I was playing on a 60GB CBA Digital external HDD http://www.cbadigital.co.uk/storage.htm#specs

so $125 is plenty enough clearly :)
 
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Aastii said:
I was completely wrong, the performance isn't that of what I have when playing from my hard drive (full settings @ 60fps always), but it is so easily playable.
Click to expand...
Still, wouldn't it just be easier to put photos and stuff on the external? I would think that although it's playable it would be a waste to sacrifice speed for hard disk space.
 
Either works but for a small sacrifice in load times you can move about 10GB without too much other penalty.
 
spynoodle said:
Still, wouldn't it just be easier to put photos and stuff on the external? I would think that although it's playable it would be a waste to sacrifice speed for hard disk space.
Click to expand...

It probably would be the best route performance wise. I never thought of moving other files to an EHD. I don't have that much unused space. My laptop, I believe, has a 70 GB hard drive. Vista is taking up, what, close to 20 GB's alone? Then 16.9 for WoW, BC and Wotlk with all the required patches? Those two total up to over half of my HD.

Under Computer i'm showing 5.79 GB free of 69.7. I remember reading some where about a computers Registry, over time, getting clustered with entries that never get deleted properly. Or something along those lines. If this si true what would be the best free software to clean it up?
 
Any extra registry entries will amount to a tiny fraction of your drive space. I've never liked those registry cleaners, windows optimizers, etc. CCleaner has a registry scanner and can help you reclaim hard drive space taken up by temp files that you can delete.
 
I Used Comodo and went from 5.79 to 8.25 and then I cleaned up my desktop and removed them from the recycle bin and up to 9.17 GB's free. I should be fine on space 'til I upgrade this fall.

Edit; But I have to make a disclaimer that Comodo is a 3-in-1 software. With Registry, Disc and Privacy cleaner.
 
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