Guild Wars 2

My hard drive is dying, so I’m going to be replacing & upgrading that in the next week or so. The question is whether I should just bump up to 1TB (currently at 700ish whatever the proper number is) or go ahead & spring for 2TB. Would this make any difference for running GW2 (w/ everything else being the same, i.e. speed, cache, etc.) or not?

I’m not very tech-savvy at all, so small words are good. :p

If you can afford it, buy an SSD drive.

A quality SSD drive for dedicated gaming will improve performance in all your games.

the best bang for the buck at the moment is a 2tb http://pcpartpicker.com/part/toshiba-internal-hard-drive-ph3200u1i72

with how close 1tb drives and 2tb prices are, I personally would get 2tb, below that the cost per gb is to high.

my suggestion is to partition the drive with 120-160gb for windows and stuff like office, the rest for games and apps, it can help when you run into windows issues that require a reinstall or are just easiest to fix with a reinstall.

once you get the new drive and copy your data over(just copy the gw2 folder over) try running either

http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=14

or

http://www.dban.org/

over the old drive, cant tell you how many time doing this has fixed hdd’s and flash drives/cards for me, made them useful again if only as a temp storage for downloads……(infact im using a 750gb samsung this way now for torrent downloads……)

Lexandro.1456:

If you can afford it, buy an SSD drive.

A quality SSD drive for dedicated gaming will improve performance in all your games.

by many many reports, including my own testing, gw2 dosnt benefit from ssd much if at all, it does benefit from ram caching using fancycache or the like but, far less then other games……

infact, gw2 has gotten worse on all types of drives since the beta, load times are worse even after removal of the local.dat file, I speculate its due to “optimization” by anet……

dont get a small ssd, 128gb bare minimum and thats only if your just gonna use it for your boot drive, for games 256gb is minimum, and you would want an adata 900 series or samsung 840 series drive….

either way, a 2tb hdd is a better value for most of us.

I have a my games on a 640gb i pulled from a dell, I give the drive 16-24gb of ram cache(out of 32gb ram i have in the box), games like Tera, Warframe, Startrek Online, Rift,exct all love fancycache

Re: SSD drive – looking around a little (Newegg, Amazon), it seems I’d pay twice as much for half the capacity. Afraid I can afford neither.

I’m leaning towards a WD Black 2TB. It’s at the top end of what I can afford, but maybe it’s worth it?

And I’ll mention this ‘fancycache’ thing to the tech friend who’s fixing this for me, thanks.

the blacks are nice, but, dont buy a black if you can get the toshiba with 3 year warr for the same price or less, toshiba has a higher reliability rating at the moment then wd or seagate.

Well i picked up my first SSD a couple months ago – and where I saw a vast improvement is in the load times. Loading zones is a huge improvement. LA might take 30s on a decent hard-drive where it’ll take 10s on an SSD.

takes me around 5 seconds to zone to LA with fancycache….that is if the server moves me fast enough…..

most of my waiting is on the server to decide if its gonna move me to a main map or overflow :P(i can see drive i/o and alot of times I just sit and wait for server with no I/O going on…lol)

Fancycache huh? might have to look at that. with 16gigs i can spare some

Another option would be a WD Velociraptor (10k RPM spindle speed). I’m not sure of your actual budget and my mind works in pounds sterling anyway but Amazon have one of the smaller capacity ones here:

http://www.amazon.com/VelociRaptor-500-Workstation-Hard-Drive/dp/B007VPGK42/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362004704&sr=8-1&keywords=velociraptor

- although I know you’re looking for more space but… well… take a look anyway, can’t hurt.

HDD/SSD wont affect performance much if at all. All the storage media affects is loading times of things.

In the case of a SSD the loading times that matter performance wise are those of texture access times. This can improve performance by reduce stutter but its only a slight improvment.

Storage size has nothign to do with performance so get what ever size u need.

I would advice getting a 120gb SSD for ur OS and 1 or 2 games, leaving 25% of the storage space free for performance reasons. Then have a 500gb to 1TB HDD for storage.

A fast large 10k RPM cached HDD wil lcost as much if nt more than a good 120gb SSD imo i would choose the SSD over it as u will get better performance, then by a standard 7200rpm hdd for like $60 for storage.

Or finaly u could buy a cheap storage HDD and by more RAM and use a cache program.

white lable vraptor drives
http://stores.ebay.com/goHardDrive-Wholesale-and-Retail/600GB-/_i.html?_fsub=3686859012&_sid=270414522&_trksid=p4634.c0.m322
or their nomal webstore
http://www.goharddrive.com/VelociRaptor-10000RPM-Hard-Drive-s/220.htm

I personally would just get a 2tb drive with 3 year warr ifyour only going to get 1 drive though, vraps are great for raid though….(im planning to get 4 600gb sometime in the next 6 months)