Reinstalling on new drive . . .
Only your hardware related settings are stored locally, such as graphic and sound settings, and are found under %appdata%/Guild Wars 2. If you’re only adding a drive and not changing the OS, they’ll still be there.
GW2 doesn’t actually need to be installed, so you can simply move your old GW2 folder to the new drive, Gw2.exe and Gw2.dat specifically.
Thx for reply. I will be installing a new OS as well so that information was also helpful. I know I don’t actually need to reinstall, strictly speaking, but it’s been over two years on the same installation and I thought maybe reinstalling might be good for it? I normally reinstall everything including my OS once a year or so, it’s just been unusually long in this instance and the last time I reinstalled my OS I didn’t touch my storage drive that I keep my games on . . .
Deleting your local settings (%appdata%/Guild Wars 2/Local.dat) will have more of an impact than re-installing. Local.dat may bloat over time and increase load times.
Re-installing vs copying, the only difference is that you’ll lose any data that isn’t currently in the game, so Gw2.dat will be a few GB smaller depending on what you’ve been around for. Performance-wise, there’s practically no difference (0.0000001%). If you’re looking to optimize, either copying or re-installing to a freshly formatted drive and not using it for anything else during the process would be better than using the drive as is. Defragging the drive will generally have the same effect, but not always.
Yes, both drives would be newly formatted. But what I think I understand you to be saying is that just deleting the local.dat and copying would have the same practical effect as reinstalling, which is good to know. I still don’t think I see the downside to just reinstalling though, given that both the OS drive and the drive with gw2 will be newly formatted. Seems like just two ways to get at the same thing . . .
The downside of reinstalling is that it’s going to cost ~25 GB while having no benefit. Copying just saves times. It doesn’t matter either way as both will have the same outcome.
Mmmh. I always keep an updated (or as updated as possible) backup of GW2 on my external drive. For these kinds of occasions. That way I don’t have to waste time downloading it all again. Never noticed any difference either way.