I have run WoW off a USB 3 thumb drive in a pinch. It’s not terrible.
crazy to think gamers still use old mech drives.I'm running a 512gb nvme drive for WindowsWow and all other games are on my 2tb samsung 930 pro ssdand my backup drive is a 1tb samsung 830 evo ssdMind you, my PC is an AMD 3900x with a RTX 3080 GPU.https://www.dropbox.com/s/2d3nm3mg05pupr9/119700500_3132277210215315_2122816053613279608_n.jpg?raw=1
Haven't used HDD in years. Don't miss that antique tech!
Yeah, clap clap for you filthy rich americans, some of you have no idea how difficult life can be in 3rd world countries.I wonder if you guys could show the real difference in WoW between SSD and NVMe SSD. I know the technicals, I am just curious specifically how Shadowlands would perform differently.
I haven't had WoW on a HDD for over a decade now.It's not just loading times. I have a backup WoW folder on my storage drive (a 2tb hybrid HDD) that for some reason the launcher switched to my main root folder once.After I'd loaded into the area, for an extra 10 seconds the player models and armour were still being drawn in.WoW on an HDD Is a terrible experience. With the price of SSDs now, I don't see why everyone is so angry that it may have been seen as required for a game in 2020.
Has anyone tried running Shadowlands on an M.2? I'd be curious to see that included in the comparison at some point, or to hear any educated guesses on the matter (I'm doing the first build I've done in several decades, so I'm not exactly up to speed on the new tech!).
I've used an SSD for years. Bought an M.2 SSD about two years ago to replace my main SSD for my OS because it was bigger than my original SSD. Out of 4 SSD I've bought for myself, I've lost 1 so far. Makes my failure rate 25%. I'd still rather use an SSD over a hard drive. While I have a 3 TB HDD still, my games are mostly on the SSDs.Anyone really serious about online gaming would have bought an SSD a long time ago. Spending 2 minutes loading into a PvP match only to find it already started and you now have the AFK warning is irritating. Then spending 2 minutes loading into a dungeon or even a raid only to find yourself back where you started because your group kicked you before you could load in is also irritating.
The hard drive failure rates look a bit out of date. Backblaze's overall annual failure rates are down to 0.81%, and the drives from the more reliable manufacturers are equal to or better than the 0.5% figure cited in the graphic for SSDs (and I don't know if the latter figure is for 2.5-inch packaged SATA SSDs or M.2 PCIe SSD cards, or both). While several of the drives in the Backblaze survey are unlikely to be found in PCs because of size or "quality" (NAS or "enterprise" quality), some are pretty standard desktop drives.A study done by Google (you know, the folks with billions of hard drives, at least back then) ~ 10 years ago pointed out after about 2005, the quality of HDDs was such that they failed in the first few weeks of use, or not at all in the several years of the study. I wouldn't;t lose a lot of sleep over HDD reliability these days.That said, SSDs are better than HDDs, unless you rewrite the entire drive so much and so often that the SSD wears out — an unlikely use case for most home PC owners.
I use a NVMe drive myself, and the differences are even more profound than using an SSD. On the same Rig (and I do have a very high end Rig, personally), the SSD was taking about 20 seconds, to achieve these results. On the NVMe, about 5 -7 seconds, and this was only due to the ping rate between myself and Blizzards servers, that caused any extra latency there. Considering that NVMe's are coming down in price, quite dramatically, any-one wanting to buy/build a new gaming computer, I would HIGHLY recommend that you get one with motherboard that can support at least 1 MVMe drives (I have 2*2TB Western Digital Black Drives). In my new rig now, I have completely removed all other types of drive, no platter, nor SSD. Disk access time is so quick, that even Windows 10 Pro has trouble "keeping up" :-P
I already have WoW on an SSD and it takes a lot of time to load each map (several seconds) I cannot imagine what it would take to load that on HDD. Given that the game has very low texture and model quality I wonder why they don't invest more in some better tech to store those files more load friendly. I suspect that their mechanism to dynamically patch the game files works against that.