Thirteen WoW windows in 36 seconds with an SSD
by Mike Schramm 
Oct 6th 2008 at 2:30PM
Normal hard drives, like the one in your computer (unless you've already shelled out a ton of cash for an SSD) have discs in them that spin, and they take time to find the information stored on them -- that's why, when you double click your WoW icon, it takes a few seconds (up to a few minutes if you've got a slower computer) for your WoW window to load up. But a "solid state" hard drive doesn't have discs or moving parts -- it's essentially one big block of memory -- so it's much, much faster in terms of retriving information. And what's going on in the video on their website is that they're pulling so much information from the hard drive that WoW is installed on that it's taking only seconds to load up thirteen windows' worth of WoW.
Of course, how fast all of those windows actually run depends on a lot of other things in the computer -- you'd need a lot more than just an SSD to have the video power to run 13 separate 3D windows at the same time (though TGDaily says they weren't breaking the bank at 5 instances running, they just didn't have any more accounts), not to mention the bandwidth that would come from 13 different connections. But just the startup is interesting enough -- eventually these SSD drives will become cheap enough to be used all over the place, and information will be almost instantly accessible from wherever it's stored on your PC.
Filed under: Fan stuff, Odds and ends, Hardware
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
ZekeGrimsblade Oct 6th 2008 2:35PM
Heck yes!!! And another bottleneck goes down!!!
Matazuma Oct 6th 2008 2:40PM
Solo karazhan and do 3v3 arena at the same time! brilliant!
Saelorn Oct 6th 2008 2:43PM
Speaking of ten-boxxing, is there anything in the terms of service regarding 5v5 arena matches against yourself? As long as you don't intentionally throw the fight, I mean.
DJTyrant Oct 6th 2008 2:43PM
Mike, it's not E3 for All just E for All :P
See you at BlizzCon this year :)
Kitteh, Twilights Hammer EU Oct 6th 2008 7:58PM
There's a new intel SSD drive going to be on the market shortly that basically blows everything else out of the water. A LOT of the multilayer (cheap) SSD drives have problems with stuttering, as soon as you start using them for more than one thing at once they get significantly slower.
Get a single layer (not MMC, but I forget what it is) when the price is reasonable.
Julemand Oct 6th 2008 2:50PM
im not terrible impressed about this, im sure a good 7200rpm hdd could do as well or atleast come pretty close, they are not even login into the game just open to the login screen.
Joshua Ochs Oct 6th 2008 2:57PM
Your ignorance of SSD's is most impressive.
Whenever you load multiple applications simultaneously (especially one with huge graphics and texture requirements like WoW), you're going to be "thrashing", as the disk head moves back and forth constantly trying to read a little bit here for that app, a little bit there for another app, etc. RPM has nothing to do with it - this is all about seek time, and it adds up fast.
SSD's have no seek time. Any block of memory can be accessed as fast as any other block, and at any time. This is exactly the scenario in which an SSD will CRUSH a standard hard drive.
Now, SSD's aren't all alike either - there's MLC (slow, high-capacity, cheap) SSD's and SLC (fast, not-as-high-capacity, not-as-cheap) SSD's. But for a test like this that is all about random read performance, any SSD will kill a hard drive.
Dinnerbone Oct 6th 2008 3:02PM
7200 RPM doesn't come close to an SSD, which does no RPM at all. A disk drive can only read a small bit of data when the laser is at that specific part of the disk, which might look pretty fast but it's actually pretty slow. SSD drives work like your RAM, which is essentially a big chip - it has no laser, no moving parts, it's just data. No spin-up time, no retrieval time trying to get the laser into position, it's instant. The only limitation to a SSD speed is the bandwidth/latency going to/from your computer, which your normal HDD has too.
It also has other advantages too; your computer has extremely little 'boot-up' time, most of that was your HDD spinning up to full speed. It also has a much higher lifespan than HDDs, as no moving parts means no maintenance and extremely small chance of failure in relation to HDDs. They also have very little power consumption, no noise at all (HDDs are usually loud), and aren't effected by file fragmentation ;D
Drakkenfyre Oct 6th 2008 3:14PM
"A disk drive can only read a small bit of data when the laser is at that specific part of the disk"
I just wanted to add, hard drives don't use lasers, lol. CD/DVD/BluRay/ect. drives do. Hard drives use platters and magnetic read/write heads.
Candina@WH Oct 6th 2008 3:19PM
re: Dinnerbone:
You are mostly correct. But most HDD are not optical, and do not use a laser, they use a magneto ferrous read head.
The bottleneck on a Very Fast HD is seek time. The bottleneck on SSD is bus Speed.
No matter how fast you spin the platters, you will have seek time. SSD is one single addressable space.
Naix Oct 6th 2008 3:34PM
Current OSes are smart enough to check ram cache first before going back to the hard drive to find data. SSD is nice but current hard drives preform 95% as well and are a fraction of the cost.
This gets a Meh.
Zamboni Oct 6th 2008 4:50PM
Don't confuse the current crop of flash drives running through the IDE/SATA controllers with real solid state DRAM drives plugged into the motherboard. I've used the RAM boards before and they are insanely fast compared to hard drives or flash drives (with a price tag to match).
Ametrine Oct 6th 2008 3:08PM
Nerdgasm!
Of course, SSD drives are inevitable, because with the current rotary drives, access speed is affected by how fast the drives can spin - and there is an upper-limit to how fast they can go without risking damage. The current pace of 7200 RPM isn't terribly far off from that "rupture limit".
crsh Oct 6th 2008 3:14PM
Well there are 15k rpm hard drives, but yeah it's definitely getting very close to the limit; solid-state is a potent alternative.
Drakkenfyre Oct 6th 2008 3:15PM
"The current pace of 7200 RPM isn't terribly far off from that "rupture limit"."
You are aware there are 10,000 RPM hard drives, right? Lol.
Ametrine Oct 6th 2008 3:19PM
I said it wasn't too far away from the limit, not that it WAS the limit.
lazarel Oct 6th 2008 3:31PM
@Ametrine said...
'I said it wasn't too far away from the limit, not that it WAS the limit.'
Actually, 7200 is closer to Zero than it is to 15000. I suppose 15000 might be 'not too far from the limit', but 7200 not so much.
ZekeGrimsblade Oct 6th 2008 11:35PM
Some things I would like to point out.... A spinning hard drive is like a Gyroscope, the faster the rotation, the worse even the earth's rotation can try to make it move..... And the distance between the head and the platter is smaller then the width of a hair..... improper mounting/rough treatment while spinning can spell a destroyed HD fast. I can't help but wonder how useful those higher speeds would be... without ripping themselves apart.
Julemand Oct 6th 2008 3:10PM
Joshua Ochs there might be "huge graphics and texture requirements" if they was actually loading the full wow, but thats not the case here, they only show the loading screen, now if they was loading 13 full wow clients in 36sek i would actually be impressed :)
Mike Schramm Oct 6th 2008 3:13PM
Remember that they're loading all of these instances *off of one installation*, too. It's not like there are 13 different folders being read -- it's accessing the exact same files. And they even say they were only pegging the processor at around 55% -- the reason they didn't do more is that they just didn't have the accounts to sign in with.