Large HD killed my WoW.

Yeah, ok, time to ask for help ...

So a few months ago I needed more space since I maxxed out my 75Gb HD. So I went to Best-Buy and got me a 300Gb HD.

Installed, partitioned to 300Gb, and such.

During the install, XP bitched about the partition being greater than 74-ish Mb and asked if I wanted to adjust some registry setting to allow for >74-ish sized partitions.

I said sure, gof er it, and it did.

So now I have a 74-ish C: and a new 300Gb D:.

Um, things slowed down a bit. Disk access/throughput it seems. I noticed right off the bat when I started moving stuff from C: to D:.

Around the same time of course WoW comes out and when I enter IF I get some good old lag. I look down, HD is flashing faster than a $2 hooker. Constant for about 30 to 60 seconds. WoW is unresponsive during this time, but after it's done playing jitterbug with my HD, things are usable.

This reminds me of old EQ when you rounded the corner towards the bank in freeport. I resolved that problem with getting more RAM.

So now I'm thinking that maybe this registry tweak XP did to allow for the 300Gb partition is my culprit since the sluggy-nish is outside of WoW too. I've never had Photoshop or anything bog down like this prior to the 300Gb install.

Anyone know wher eI can find info out about this registry change XP did on me or other things to check to speed things up?

Heck, I'm getting to the point where I wanna reformat the whole system and only have partion sizes under 75 megs if that makes things back to normal.

A gnome thx U.

... Bonzai


Edit: Alienware 2.8Ghz, 500Mb RAM PC-1066. nVidia Ti 4600

[Ashes Emberblade]

Might be a bad hard drive. I had one that did the same exact thing, then about a week later, died.

[Eomer]

I installed a 200gb SATA drive on my computer a few months back, and in all honesty I don't remember Windows XP asking me anything about greater than 75GB partitions. But then again, my previous drive was around 80GB, so maybe that's why? Either way, your problem sounds strange, and I doubt enabling support for larger partitions would have much to do with it. Like the above poster said, it may well be a defective drive.

The only other thing I could think of is maybe some problem with your swap file. Try completely disabling all swap files/virtual memory in the control panel, defragging the hell out of both drives, and then recreating a single one on either of the drives (personally, I've got 3 HD's in my computer, I have Windows and most games installed on the large SATA drive, and then storage and virtual memory on the 80gb ATA/100 drive, seems to work great). If that doesn't clear things up, then you may want to reformat and start from scratch to see if that fixes it.

[paanar]

I don't recall there ever existing a barrier at 75GB.

There is a 64GB barrier in Win98 and 98SE and one at 127.53GB on FAT32. The next is a physical limitation of the ATA interface where the 28bits used for addressing cannot address more than 137GB of space.

System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Atapi\Parameters]
Value Name: EnableBigLba
Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)
Value Data: (0 = disabled, 1 = enabled)

The WinXP registry setting you refer to is 48bit addressing (the solution to the 137GB ATA limitation.) If your system is running slow it's not from this registry change.

Is WoW installed to this 300G drive now? Are you using other things on this 300G drive while playing WoW? If you are, that could be your problem. Most large drives tend to have low performance. Did Photoshop ask to put it's page file on the new drive? I tried moving it to my secondary drive once-upon-a-time but it was slower so I moved it back to the main drive.

Theres a hundred configuration settings that could make your system slow but since you say it was fine before the new drive I would have to say it has something to do with the files you copied to the new drive. A combination of that, and the inherrent performance loss of a large drive.

I leave you with this link from Tom's hardware which is a benchmark and review of some mastadonic drives.