Seagate Momentus XT - World of Warcraft Question

Hi all,

I play the nerdy game known as World of Warcraft and I'm about to receive my new Alienware m17x from Dell. I've been looking at SSDs which are still very expensive, nearly $1.25/gb.

The hybrid Seagate looks very temping at $100 for 500gb, but does it really perform almost as well a SSD?

I don't know if anyone here plays WoW, probably not... But when you go into a city, mainly Dalaran, you can have the fastest computer ever, but if you have a 7200 rpm drive in there, the characters take forever to load from the HDD. Would a hybrid Seagate be able to fix this just as well as an SSD?

Sorry for so many questions, but I don't want to buy this and get a dud. Thanks for any and all help!

 

Don't play / don't game - but if it is really simply loading data off of your local storage (vs. downloading from your ISP) then an SSD will be superior.

You need to spend the big bucks to see a performance increase if your game is limited by the level/loads.

Again: assuming that local loads are the problem - a Seagate XT Hybrid is no match for a 'real' SSD.

Intel 320 160GB recommended for SATA2 platforms - Intel 510 250GB recommended for SATA3 systems (like yours...).

Good luck.

 

Thanks a bunch. I didn't think that the 4gb SSD cache would do wonders besides increasing boot times. Seagates videos on YouTube are very misleading. I'll start looking at SSDs now.

Thanks again!

 

I seriously doubt that your hard drive will be bottlenecking your games.

 

My Seagate XT boots and launches my applications as fast as an SSD.

As my video shows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8n3fraKjHE&feature=player_embedded

What hard drive brand / type is your 320GB 7200rpm?

 

My setup includes a Intel SSD 510 120gb for the OS, and a Seagate Momentus XT 500gb for my games.
I did try some games on the SSD like BF: Bad Company 2 but it did not really load that much faster.

 

If I am not mistaken (I easily could be), a Hard Drive has really nothing to do with a game other than load times (things like boot up, maps, instances, etc) and displaying characters is a rendering by your GPU rather than a load by your HDD/SSD.

You're not going to be bottlenecked by your read/write speeds when gaming, especially in a game like World of Warcraft. You should be worried at all about running that game on an m17x.

Ideally, a 7200 RPM drive is more than enough for gaming. When I played World of Warcraft, I usually was the first person to load into an instance, and I'm still using a 5400 RPM drive.

 

Actually if you look at some benchmarks on Tomshardware/Anandtech, u'll see that the major difference between 5400 and 7200 rpm drives is the load times.

This is because those texture files and level files are all installed on your hard disk, and the slower your hard disk spins, the slower your computer can access the file needed and send the information forward to the GPU/CPU to handle.

Hence, it DOES matter, and a SSD will help your performance.

What the XT (and Windows 7) does, to my understanding, is rank the importance/frequency of use of your files, and place the ones which are most used or important (ie. system files) on the flash memory.

Therefore, if the XT is really as efficient as advertised in doing the above, it should theoretically be able to help you improve your WoW experience to the level of a true SSD (since you will be accessing "Dalaran" quite often on your hard disk).

 

If you're talking about the how you can't see anything except the names and guilds of the hundreds of characters around you immediately after landing from a flightpath or hearthing, I've always been under the impression that that's more of a network issue than a disk issue.

 

Yep they call it the server bandwidth lag. Your computer hardware or internet connection has nothing to do with it.

That's why even Powerful SLI/Crossfire desktop computers are even lagging on high/ultra settings on wow because it is poorly coded and like I just mentioned it's something more to do on the server itself.

 

Write speeds don't matter, but IMO read speeds and the fast access times really improve the WoW gaming experience.

It isn't just the loading bar, though it is gratifying to see it fly across. AFAIK WoW also loads a lot of textures dynamically as you travel through the environment, and with an SSD all the little hitches goes away.

Doesn't the M17x have two drive bays? You can maybe just get a cheap SSD for WoW, or even for WoW and Windows 7, and then have everything else on the HDD.

 

I hate to resurrect an old thread but after looking for information about the momentus, I found this thread.

the info quoted is simply wrong as evidenced by this video WoW Dalaran - SSD vs HDD - YouTube

warcraft is a resource hog and people falsely believe its not intensive on high end hardware.

I'm left wondering if the 4gb on the momentus xt would benefit warcraft or if the data files in wow are too big. I can guarantee SSD benefits this game tremendously.