Two Accounts on two harddrives

[Ballard]

Ok, Ive just bought another account. Would i be better off running the copies on two seperate harddrives? I have a new Western digital with a nice fat cache upon which I run my current copy of DAOC. My 'old' hardrive is an 80gb and is not as fast as the new one but still 'okay' as its only 2 years old.

Would this reduce harddrive read contention? and thus improve performance?

Thanks

 

[oblimov]

interesting theory there

I run 2 accts from the same hard drive but with 2 copies of the games folder

In theory i guess that by having two drives each program can read data which may have been taken up at the time by each other so yeah i would say it should ....in theory

 

[frogster]

I can only really see this improving performance if they are on different ide channels, and even then, i would think the performance increase would be marginal... if any at all.

 

[Ballard]

hmm didnt think the bus would be the limiting factor in this situation, My knowledge gets a little hazy tho on this (its been awhile since I studied system design at uni.. and even then I only really played with RISC not CISC systems). But you could be right. I was just thinking two heads have got to be better than one.. (bad pun intended)

 

[Moo]

why do you need 2 copies of the game folder?

i run both accounts frequently from just 1 copy of the toa client or 1 copy of the si client and it works fine


cant see how running 2 from 2 seperate folders would help anything, let alone 2 seperate hard drives.

if you really want to run both accounts at the same time and have no lag in the background one you're gonna need a HT processor or even better a dual processor system.

oh and a gig of mem

 

[Ballard]

Okay each hardrive has a 'head' which effectively reads the data from the physical disc as a bitstream. The head is kinda like the head on an old analog record player. It can only perform one action at once. Luckily it is very good at multi tasking. However when it is reading data for a given process it cannot read data for another process. However if there were two hardrives this problem would be diminshed somewhat. The performance during normal operation probably would not be noticably different, however when zoning one harddrive most likely has a brief period of intense operation and there should theoretically be a performance gain if the other process had to access the HD during this operation (or indeed zone at the same time).

I may try it out and see if how it works. Most likely it wont be noticably but ill try anyway

There are some interesting prototype multi head hardrives being developed at the moment, it will be interesting to see if they evolve into a consumer device...

 

[Fana]

I have 2 comps now, but when i only had one i did play my main acc and my bot acc from 2 different hd's. Im not sure how much of a performance increase i got from it (could still not stick the bot etc, and loading when zoning both accs was still slow) but i heard it was supposed to be better that way.

 

[Danya]

2 hdds will help load times somewhat, it won't affect in game performance as that's determined by memory, cpu and gpu.

 

[Devaster]

2 hdd's can only make loading faster, to keep 2 acc's on stick u need CPU with HT technology.