Playing WoW off an SD card
by Adam Holisky 
Jan 10th 2009 at 12:01AM
This week at the popular Consumer Electronics Show (CES as everyone calls it) our sister site Engadget was covering all the hoopla. Some exciting technology was unveiled that will allow a theoretical 2 terabytes of data to be stored on a new SD card format called SDXC. An SD card is the kind of card you can put in your camera. Most desktop and laptops have SD drives built in these days, so you probably have access to one even if you don't know it.The cards are great for storing pictures and other data. I've used a 2 gigabyte one quite a bit to transfer around files, and in particular relevance to WoW, large addon and configuration directories (the WTF folder in the root WoW directory). It's much faster to put the 150 megabyte of WoW configuration files onto the card and physically transfer it than to deal with a slow and shabby WiFi connection.
However with the introduction of this new technology an interesting prospect is raised: playing WoW off an SD card directly.
Panasonic hope to have a 64GB card available soon, and rumors are saying sometime around March. Of course the cards will be a couple hundred dollars most likely, but nonetheless when this happens I will be easily able to transfer my entire WoW directory onto the card and play it from there.
The speed of the data transfer will be such that it'll easily be able to handle WoW (which is itself based on five+ year old technology). And the added benefit of having to not update my laptop's game every time there's a patch or I change addons or configurations, which happens quite often in my job here at WoW Insider, will be more than worth the cost.
One could argue that I can already do this with a portable hard drive, and they'd be correct. But those, despite their usefulness, are quite bulky and I have a personal way of breaking them more often than not.
So it looks like this new SD card format will be something I'm picking up quite fast, if only to further ease the way I WoW.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
James Jan 10th 2009 12:05AM
They predict its can hold up to 2TB on one little sd card. That would be nice. Not only could you carry WoW, but 4 copies of your hard drive!
Drakkenfyre Jan 10th 2009 2:10AM
There's only one problem here. SD cards, and most likely this new format of them, have read/write limits. After so many reads and writes they fail. The number is very high, in the millions for SD cards, but with the amount of times the game reads something, it's going to give you wear and tear on the cards, lol.
Malreth Jan 10th 2009 3:32AM
There is no read limits to flash memory; just write limits and the cards will automatically write-level the space on the drive to preserve the life of the electronics. Furthermore, when a block of memory does die, it'll just not use that one block and redirect the writes elsewhere.
In short, you don't have to worry about write limits in practice.
Plastic Rat Jan 10th 2009 3:33AM
@Drakkenfyre, sorry to deviate from the subject, but I'm really interested. Did you actually laugh out loud at the end of your post? What was the reason for this?
Ed (Sindarin, Hydraxis US) Jan 10th 2009 7:32AM
I've got a 16GB SD card, which is just enough to fit WoW onto now - I can't say I've ever tried playing WoW directly off it though, but it's been very convenient for transferring WoW onto new computers.
George Jan 10th 2009 8:37AM
I've done it, played WoW on a 16gb SDHC card on an EeePC, no less (I mean, MORE).
Got around 4-5 fps in Shattrath. Joy.
But for AH'ing on the go, it did the job quite well.
Vengence Jan 10th 2009 10:26AM
ok, im a net tech,-the biggest thing that will limit the data transfer rate is your Processor.
Also Vista feature ready boost needs special ready boost enabled SD/USB flash.
Also there is a write limit, and yes you will want a back up of your SD WOW for when the original breaks.
Drakkenfyre Jan 10th 2009 11:10AM
Plastic Rat, I was indicating humor at the idea of the SD card suddenly dying on you because it had reached it's maximum read/write capacity because it had been used so much. Like this, lol.
Eisengel Jan 11th 2009 6:04AM
@Vengence
Actually the thing most likely to limit your speed is the interface technology. I'm pretty sure something like SD is going to be on a DMA channel... in which case the data and data move instructions won't even be seen by your CPU. If that's the case then it will be the type of SD you have and your motherboard's South Bridge chipset & bus that will limit the speed. Even if we were still using synchronous, programmed I/O these days, processors are so fast it's unlikely that they would be that much of a bottleneck anyway. The worst part would be the constant pipeline flushes for every I/O.
Warren Jan 10th 2009 12:06AM
I play of a hard drive. I carry it around and I get free time and a free computer. Its wow time!
Shadow946 Jan 10th 2009 12:08AM
If the card is not connected via USB, is it possible that an SD card would transfer to the RAM faster than a hard drive (no disc to speed up)?
Adam Holisky Jan 10th 2009 12:14AM
No, memory speeds are insanely fast. And even if the speed of the drive were faster than internal RAM, the way the computer handles the drive would (in nearly all cases) still limit the speed of the data reception.
Riley Jan 10th 2009 1:12AM
he said it'd be faster than a hard drive, not RAM
anyways, they're almost always going to be connected via USB, even built-in readers are connected via usb, i don't think there's any SATA readers (which wouldn't really be that good of an idea anyways, because most readers support multiple card types and i dont think you can connect multiple drives via one sata cable)
Shadow946 Jan 10th 2009 1:37AM
at any rate, it would be like a mini-solid state sort of thing
Thander Jan 10th 2009 1:41AM
Windows Vista's ReadyBoost works like this but only for the pagefile. It works with pretty much any media including USB flash drives and SD cards.
Simple to set up:
1. Insert media.
2. Right click media in the My Computer screen
3. Choose to use it for ReadyBoost.
USB 2.0 has been out a long time but its still faster than using the hard drive as a cache for virtual memory. And every computer does uses some virtual memory even when you have extra RAM.
Vengence Jan 10th 2009 10:28AM
lol
USB
Universal SERIAL bus
Eisengel Jan 11th 2009 6:08AM
Well, PCMCIA is pin-compatible with IDE, so if you could find a SD to PCMCIA (32-bit) reader, all you need is a socket and some wire and you can plug it directly into an IDE port.
Sannin Jan 10th 2009 12:30AM
SDHC already has a maximum theoretical limit of 2TB. They just put a restriction on it imposed by the SD standards group.. The "new" SDXC is just microsoft's way of getting people to use their exFAT file system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
jrb Jan 10th 2009 1:17AM
if you're using vista or windows7 just format it UDF if you're THAT concerned about using microsoft file formats. I do the same on a usb stick, not because i'm being a tin-foil hat wearing FUD merchant, but because i can put large media files on to it, and my xbox plays them without hassle. something i can't do with fat32, or ntfs.
not sure on linux udf support, but xp doesn't support writing to udf file systems out of the box, and my macbook pro running osx 10.5 doesn't want to read my udf formatted usb stick at all... it's probably too busy thinking different or something.
stonehead Jan 10th 2009 1:48PM
jrb, your comment made me laugh twice.