How to reduce WoW HD footprint?

grandin

As I'm sure everyone is feeling in these days of p2p and torrents, hard drive space is quick becoming a premium commodity - especially if you operate from a laptop.

Right now, WoW occupies an inordinate amount of HD space - almost 5 GB - with 3.5 alone in the common.mpq.

Is there any way to reduce this? Any files I can trash without affecting the game?

Has anyone ever played WoW from an external drive?

Thanks for any advice.

s3rial one

grandin wrote:

As I'm sure everyone is feeling in these days of p2p and torrents, hard drive space is quick becoming a premium commodity

O_o

Hard drive space is dirt cheap. Rather than deleting huge chunks of WoW (which will likely prevent it from working), why not move your collection of porn/anime/furry drawings/movies/music/whatever else you're collecting to an external drive, or just upgrade your laptop's hard drive?

5GB for a game - especially a MMO - isn't all that large. Vanguard, for comparison, takes up over 17GB.

LavaKnight

Yeah, 5gb is pretty common nowadays for games. You should definitely invest in a much larger hard drive.

Spore Cloud

Another thing is that you probably collect these things like I used to, you should make a choice about what you actually plan on watching again and delete everything else. Its a tough choice but if youre really that hard up for space its one that needs to be made.

BigDes

My Hd is tiny, like 40gig, so I just bought an external HD and threw all of my stuff (stuff means porn) on there.

grandin

I keep all video external, but I like to have my photos and my itunes library local. I guess I will have to bite the bullet and get a new internal. That blows.

Just Like That

www.helpiamaddictedtoporn.com

xzzy

You can delete the old patch files out of your WoW directory.. but against 3.5 gigs, it's not going to do much.

There's nothing you can do to shrink WoW. It's as big as it is and there's nothing you can optimize.

MegaMan001

Hard drives are so ridiculously cheap right now it's almost absurd.

here is a western digital external hard drive - 40 gigs for 60 dollars US.

grandin

Xzzy, I reckon you're right.

MegaMan001, you're right too.

At the risk of turning this into a whole other thread, any suggestions on reliable consumer HDs?

A good friend of mine does some heavy-duty video post-production for commercials, and says Lacie is shit and Acom is far more reliable. Any opinions on good companies? How's Seagate? They got 500GB for <$270...

Aumni

I thought the WoW UI was burnt into your HD TV.


But yeah, buy more HDD

MegaMan001

Seagate, Raptor, and Western Digital are all extremely reliable.

I'm a Seagate man myself. One year my hard drive totally went kablooey during Finals week. I couldn't get by without a hard drive, but I was under warranty. I told the customer service rep my problem, he told me he would send me out the replacement hard drive first class airmail and I would have to send back the broken hard drive "as soon as I could".

Needless to say, I had my new hard drive the next day, and I mailed them the broken one back after finals. I don't think I've been treated as nicely as that by a company.

Shurakai

I find maxtor HD's to be noisy little buggers, so I went with a Seagate 320GB for my latest drive. My previous 250 filled up quicker than expected.

Dracil

I think you can delete the intro movie files.

-poe-

grandin wrote:

Has anyone ever played WoW from an external drive?

I'm told this works perfectly. Supposedly just copies relevant registry entries onto the local hard drive, but keeps everything else on the external HD.

grandin

MegaMan, that's certainly some good customer care. I think I'll probably end up going with Seagate - I haven't heard anything bad about them, noise, durability, speed or otherwise (touch wood). Thanks for the input.

Stover

I'm pretty sure that WoW holds onto all the old downloaded patch files. If it does, you can delete those safely.

Edit: NOT patch.mpq or whatever that is. The actual patch file that the downloader program downloaded.

Zedro

So what is the opinion on Western Digital external hard drives? I'm thinking of buying one.

Daedalus

-poe- wrote:

grandin wrote:

Has anyone ever played WoW from an external drive?

I'm told this works perfectly. Supposedly just copies relevant registry entries onto the local hard drive, but keeps everything else on the external HD.

Um. That's the way it works for pretty much any game. Registry entires (and sometimes save files) go on the drive you boot from, and the game data goes wherever you install it. I run most of my games from an external drive. It's great; it means when I have my laptop in class, I'm not playing games.

tsmvengy

MegaMan001 wrote:

Hard drives are so ridiculously cheap right now it's almost absurd.

here is a western digital external hard drive - 40 gigs for 60 dollars US.

Don't spend 60 dollars on that crap. Get THIS and one of THESE. DO IT!

That is just an example. You could also get an IDE drive and an enclosure that uses IDE and USB 2.0 or Firewire. But you'll get a way better value that way than buying a special "external" drive - more GB for your $. The only thing with using 3.5" drives is that it's not going to be super portable - in which case you can always get a 2.5" drive and a 2.5" enclosure if you want it to be more portable. Bottom line is its usually cheaper per GB to get a drive and enclosure rather than an external drive.

HyperAquaBlast

I just bought a WD 500gb SATA internal hard drive which is apparently the newest and best model ever. I then bought an enclosure for it and now run it too my laptop and have installed almost every game I own it. No problems or slow loads what so ever.

Enclosure
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16817145660

hard drive
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822136073

grandin

HyperAquaBlast,

Thanks for the links. I can't believe how cheap those are. Are there any advantages/risks to putting an internal drive into an enclosure vs. buying a readymade external? Also, how difficult is it? Can the layman just put it all together, or does it require soldering and/or professional labor?

LavaKnight

Umm...

If I were you, I'd either buy a tough external drive, or just install a new one. The second option would be cheaper, but it depends on your needs.

chrono_traveller

grandin wrote:

HyperAquaBlast,

Thanks for the links. I can't believe how cheap those are. Are there any advantages/risks to putting an internal drive into an enclosure vs. buying a readymade external? Also, how difficult is it? Can the layman just put it all together, or does it require soldering and/or professional labor?

You really can't (or to be technical, shouldn't) do it on your own. External hard drives work through either your USB or Firewire ports on your comp. Internal hard drives (SATA in this case) use an entirely different protocol. The only way to have an internal drive on the outside would to actually make a hole in your case an run a cable out to your drive, not a good thing.

So, basically internal is faster and to install it really doesn't take much (just need to hook up two cables, data and power, and the use of a screwdriver) to install, while a external is slower but no setup needed and can be useful if you need to use large amounts of data on multiple computers.

grandin

Buying a new internal laptop drive would be cheaper? I'm working from a PPC iBook. I somehow doubt that would be cheaper than HyperAqua's internal+enclosure. 500GB for $200? That's cheaper than any off-the-shelf external 500GB I've seen...

LavaKnight

Well, it seems like you're pretty limited to what you need based on the laptop you have. This one isn't much more expensive for 500 gb.

Personally, I'd go for something a lot smaller and cheaper. I'm not sure how these work with macs, if they're just plug and play or what.

Monoxide

chrono_traveller wrote:

grandin wrote:

HyperAquaBlast,

Thanks for the links. I can't believe how cheap those are. Are there any advantages/risks to putting an internal drive into an enclosure vs. buying a readymade external? Also, how difficult is it? Can the layman just put it all together, or does it require soldering and/or professional labor?

You really can't (or to be technical, shouldn't) do it on your own. External hard drives work through either your USB or Firewire ports on your comp. Internal hard drives (SATA in this case) use an entirely different protocol. The only way to have an internal drive on the outside would to actually make a hole in your case an run a cable out to your drive, not a good thing.

So, basically internal is faster and to install it really doesn't take much (just need to hook up two cables, data and power, and the use of a screwdriver) to install, while a external is slower but no setup needed and can be useful if you need to use large amounts of data on multiple computers.

Uh...you know that they make enclosures for this exact purpose, right? You just plug the ATA cable into the HDD and screw it into the enclosure, and the enclosure hooks up to the PC via USB. Whether or not you should do this depends on price. It's not hard, but most external drives are more expensive than they should be.

If this is a laptop we're talking about, do what HyperAqua did. You can't really add an internal drive to a laptop, there's no room for it. You could replace the existing one with a larger drive, but it's a pain in the ass. Just get an external or internal+enclosure, whichever will give you the most space for the least money.

stigweard

G4 iBook and you can play WoW on it? I tried when it first came out and it was a horrible slideshow. Forget about replacing the iBook drive unless it dies. There is a manual you can get for it on ifixit.com but it is 17 pages and you have to take the laptop almost completely apart to do it. (I am in the process because mine started the click of death a few days ago).

chrono_traveller

Monoxide wrote:

chrono_traveller wrote:

grandin wrote:

HyperAquaBlast,

Thanks for the links. I can't believe how cheap those are. Are there any advantages/risks to putting an internal drive into an enclosure vs. buying a readymade external? Also, how difficult is it? Can the layman just put it all together, or does it require soldering and/or professional labor?

You really can't (or to be technical, shouldn't) do it on your own. External hard drives work through either your USB or Firewire ports on your comp. Internal hard drives (SATA in this case) use an entirely different protocol. The only way to have an internal drive on the outside would to actually make a hole in your case an run a cable out to your drive, not a good thing.

So, basically internal is faster and to install it really doesn't take much (just need to hook up two cables, data and power, and the use of a screwdriver) to install, while a external is slower but no setup needed and can be useful if you need to use large amounts of data on multiple computers.

Uh...you know that they make enclosures for this exact purpose, right? You just plug the ATA cable into the HDD and screw it into the enclosure, and the enclosure hooks up to the PC via USB. Whether or not you should do this depends on price. It's not hard, but most external drives are more expensive than they should be.

If this is a laptop we're talking about, do what HyperAqua did. You can't really add an internal drive to a laptop, there's no room for it. You could replace the existing one with a larger drive, but it's a pain in the ass. Just get an external or internal+enclosure, whichever will give you the most space for the least money.

I actually didn't know this. I've never really looked into it, because I basically use my laptop just for ppt presentations and to ssh to other computers to do heavy computation. Interesting though.

Deusfaux

Stover wrote:

I'm pretty sure that WoW holds onto all the old downloaded patch files. If it does, you can delete those safely.

Edit: NOT patch.mpq or whatever that is. The actual patch file that the downloader program downloaded.

they're all .exe's i believe

MrDeadMan

Since we're on the subject of enclosures, I could almost swear I once saw an enclosure that had two USB ports, one for power and data, the other for just power. That way, it didn't require an external power supply, just two free powered USB ports. Ever since then I've never been able to find it again. Does anyone else know of this or where I could find one?

tydrk

Word of warning never buy a maddog enclosure. Thing commited suicide the moment i plugged it in.

HyperAquaBlast

grandin wrote:

HyperAquaBlast,

Thanks for the links. I can't believe how cheap those are. Are there any advantages/risks to putting an internal drive into an enclosure vs. buying a readymade external? Also, how difficult is it? Can the layman just put it all together, or does it require soldering and/or professional labor?

it took like 2 minutes tops. You unscrew the rear enclosure lid plug the drive in then put the lid back on and the plug in the USB and AC plugs voila your done. Just format drive and store away. And then when I build a new PC this fall I can reuse the hard drive for it unlike a premade external drive.

khain

chrono_traveller wrote:

grandin wrote:

HyperAquaBlast,

Thanks for the links. I can't believe how cheap those are. Are there any advantages/risks to putting an internal drive into an enclosure vs. buying a readymade external? Also, how difficult is it? Can the layman just put it all together, or does it require soldering and/or professional labor?

You really can't (or to be technical, shouldn't) do it on your own. External hard drives work through either your USB or Firewire ports on your comp. Internal hard drives (SATA in this case) use an entirely different protocol. The only way to have an internal drive on the outside would to actually make a hole in your case an run a cable out to your drive, not a good thing.

So, basically internal is faster and to install it really doesn't take much (just need to hook up two cables, data and power, and the use of a screwdriver) to install, while a external is slower but no setup needed and can be useful if you need to use large amounts of data on multiple computers.

Maybe I'm misreading what your saying, but buying a internal HD and then buying a enclosure is no different than buying a external hard drive. The only difference is you have to plug the sata or ide connector into the drive and screw the enclosure together.

Houk the Namebringer

khain wrote:

chrono_traveller wrote:

grandin wrote:

HyperAquaBlast,

Thanks for the links. I can't believe how cheap those are. Are there any advantages/risks to putting an internal drive into an enclosure vs. buying a readymade external? Also, how difficult is it? Can the layman just put it all together, or does it require soldering and/or professional labor?

You really can't (or to be technical, shouldn't) do it on your own. External hard drives work through either your USB or Firewire ports on your comp. Internal hard drives (SATA in this case) use an entirely different protocol. The only way to have an internal drive on the outside would to actually make a hole in your case an run a cable out to your drive, not a good thing.

So, basically internal is faster and to install it really doesn't take much (just need to hook up two cables, data and power, and the use of a screwdriver) to install, while a external is slower but no setup needed and can be useful if you need to use large amounts of data on multiple computers.

Maybe I'm misreading what your saying, but buying a internal HD and then buying a enclosure is no different than buying a external hard drive. The only difference is you have to plug the sata or ide connector into the drive and screw the enclosure together.

you also gain a faster, cheaper drive.

BushidoGamer

HyperAquaBlast wrote:

I just bought a WD 500gb SATA internal hard drive which is apparently the newest and best model ever. I then bought an enclosure for it and now run it too my laptop and have installed almost every game I own it. No problems or slow loads what so ever.

Enclosure
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16817145660

hard drive
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822136073

I was reading the reviews for the enclosure and are were a few problems. They've said that it doesn't support capacities over 500GB (this might not be entirely true), no support for firewire and that SATA speed is reduced to 1.5GB/s. Do ya wanna shoot down any of these and/or are you willing to recommend another one? I wanna buy one that's cheap, fast and hassle free which is a bit much to ask.

Edit: For grammar.

Dratatoo

G4 iBook and you can play WoW on it? I tried when it first came out and it was a horrible slideshow. Forget about replacing the iBook drive unless it dies. There is a manual you can get for it on ifixit.com but it is 17 pages and you have to take the laptop almost completely apart to do it. (I am in the process because mine started the click of death a few days ago).

I worked for an Apple reseller and had to take iBooks and mac minis appart. Its no fun at all. Basically you have to memorize all the steps and do it in reversal in order to put the whole machine together. You also need to make a draft of the screws location because every one had a different size. You had to unscrew like 35 of these things in total. Not to mention the screeching (now I am gonna break) sound when you pry the upper and lower plastic part appart.