well comparing to swtor is not fair tbh , wow loads tons of new graphics and addons effect too. i play it on HDD & it’s a nightmare. old zones load quicker but DF zones take ages to load. not more than any new game tho. and if i remember correctly swtor doesn’t have map as big as dragon isles etc.
My best guess is WoW’s resource files are scattered all over the place and SSDs are significantly better at hunting down tons of small things.
But whether this is inherent to WoW’s file storage method or the game’s map structure, I don’t know.
What is funny is that Windows XP Pro was less than 2GB and Wrath around 8GB. And game was better and OS aswell. Now Windows is over 50GB and WoW file over 80GB. And there is zero improvement in the game.
I have no idea why. The difference is huge tho. I’d suggest putting it back on the SSD or buying a second one if you lack space I was blown away by the difference myself.
The problem is intermittant and pretty hit and miss. I have mine on a hard disk with Win10 and if the game doesn’t load immediately I just fire up YouTube and watch that for five minutes. It does take that long. Other times I can get straight in. Once in the game I am OK.
Funny thing is that I had the same installation on my Win7 machine only up until recently and I like never had the problem with the hard drive. On the Win10 machine when I check system resources the drive goes into max transfer and flat lines for over five minutes… but not every time.
Your HDDs isn’t in use when files are loaded. That’s what your RAM is for.
HDDs only store files and serve as save space for information. They have no other purpose than that. If your Loading Screens are slow, that’s due to your HDDs being slow to access, read out and return information to your RAM/CPU.
I did quite a bit of research on this subject a while back and its what I gleaned from various posts regarding the matter on tech sites. There is no escaping for me that at the click of the launch the disk activity flat lines at its peak on system resources and stays that way for five minutes or so. This happens more frequently than not for me and it points to a drive issue using Win10. If there was simply a delay in launching there wouldn’t be any massive disk activity. I actually know when the game is about to start cus I hear the drive ramp down. Never ever happens on my Win7 machine.