hard drive out of space

[therealbowser]

I feel like I'm missing something here... But isn't WoW going to play notably slower since none of it is on the SSD?

I play WoW off of my HDD, personally. If you have no space on the SSD, you either have to remove something else to make room for WoW, or move WoW to an HDD. It probably is slower, so if you prefer SSD load speed you should try to avoid it, of course.

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Well, it sounds like his C drive is the drive wow is already on, so would have to be D.

I meant to say E:\, no idea why I said C. Obviously, just replace the letter with whichever drive you are using. My bad.

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His game would run slower because its not on the SSD anymore...besides, wow does not install directories as an image so all the "waste" files would still be there taking up space after the reinstallation.

Just go into wow folder and delete the patch data folder, log files(if you raid and log) and screenshots. Or simply move them for archiving on the other hdd...
Addons generally dont take up much space nor does the account files.

Thats all thats needed to save space.

He was asking how to move WoW to an HDD, and I assumed he wanted to save time and/or bandwidth; that is how to install WoW quickly with minimal bandwidth. I was assuming that space on his HDD isn't an issue, as well. Which is a reasonable assumption, I'd think.

[Deleted]

He was asking how to move WoW to an HDD, and I assumed he wanted to save time and/or bandwidth; that is how to install WoW quickly with minimal bandwidth. I was assuming that space on his HDD isn't an issue, as well. Which is a reasonable assumption, I'd think.

He was asking how to move patches and updates to the hdd, not the wow installation, he still wanted to run that from ssd.
In later posts he mentioned his wow installation was over 100gig large and his windows drive was full.

Anyhow, just quoted you to mention that the wow installer does not image directories, so if you would move junk stuff and do a "re-install", you'd still have the junk files. But you are right on saving bandwidth though.

[Kagthul]

other games and my wow folder is over 100gigs

...uhh, thats a problem. Mines 40. Might want to look to that.

[gutnbrg]

He was asking how to move patches and updates to the hdd, not the wow installation, he still wanted to run that from ssd.
In later posts he mentioned his wow installation was over 100gig large and his windows drive was full.

Anyhow, just quoted you to mention that the wow installer does not image directories, so if you would move junk stuff and do a "re-install", you'd still have the junk files. But you are right on saving bandwidth though.

yea i want to have updates and patches go to the hdd while leaving wow on the ssd

[therealbowser]

yea i want to have updates and patches go to the hdd while leaving wow on the ssd

Unfortunately there is no way to do this that I know of. You'll have to uninstall something else on your SDD if you want to play WoW on it. I recommend a reinstall (save the screenshots, WTF, and interface if you like) and moving as much random stuff to your HDD as possible. I know that I have several GB of content in my documents, my pictures, my music, etc. Those are ideal candidates for moving to an HDD, for instance.

I have no idea what is on your SSD so I can't directly advise; you may already be doing this and just have a lot of game content. Just do what you can.

[gutnbrg]

https://i.gyazo.com/2dcc18fc92a1a1cd...d060b98cd4.png

if i delete the beta it wont affect the original wow install at all right?

[chazus]

Is bandwidth even a problem? If it's not, just back up your interface, screenshots, and wtf folders, delete WoW, and redownload it. Poof, 60gb of space freed up.

That said, there IS a way to offload a good portion of your files to your HDD, without taking a performance hit, however it's sort of a process. I'd just recommend clearing up that unneeded space first.

PS: I don't know why we keep using the word 'bandwidth'. It's not accurate in... any sense. It just seemed to be the common term peopel are understanding. Data Caps are an issue, maybe.

[kaintk]

So my 250gb ssd is out of space, the ssd is where my wow is saved. I still have a regular hd with 800gb of space left on it. How do i make all wow patches/updates dl to my 800gb hd from now on? Is it possible to do that or do i need to have all my wow folders on the same hd?

do like me, buy a 1tb ssd for your games

[chazus]

do like me, buy a 1tb ssd for your games

With the price of 1TB SSD's starting to dip into the same cost as a 250gb SDD + 1TB HDD, this is becoming more and more of a viable option. Even a 500gb SSD is $70-$80 now.

[Dietrik]

You can create a directory junction point for just the datafolder which then puts just that folder on another drive... Wow sees it as part of the c: drive but it could be on any drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point

Make sure wow and the client is disabled then move the data folder to say d:\wow\data then do something like mklink /j "c:\program files (x86)\world of warcraft\data" d:\wow\data

Or you can do what people suggest and move your whole wow folder or buy a new ssd.

Don't do too many junction points and remember what you did so you can recover from them. Don't do junction points for system folders.

[gutnbrg]

https://i.gyazo.com/2dcc18fc92a1a1cd...d060b98cd4.png

if i delete the beta it wont affect the original wow install at all right?

[Shadowater]

I put beta and ptr on the HDD. Also I put games that don't have very long load times on HDD. SSDs only reduce load times, so only keep large games that have slow loading on the ssd. An SSD can load WoW 5 times faster than a HDD, atleast that's the case for me.

Edit: Also, deleting beta or ptr does not affect the main game.

[chazus]

https://i.gyazo.com/2dcc18fc92a1a1cd...d060b98cd4.png

if i delete the beta it wont affect the original wow install at all right?

Picture doesn't work, it was posted with truncation.

That said... From what I can tell, you WANT to delete wow to reinstall it with a smaller size...

[Saphyron]

https://i.gyazo.com/2dcc18fc92a1a1cd...d060b98cd4.png

if i delete the beta it wont affect the original wow install at all right?

No beta won't affect your original wow install.

[Sorshen]

If they're on the same partition, try feeing up some space with disk cleanup> clean system files. Windows update regularly piles up gigabytes of data that can be safely deleted.

You can also disable hibernate function in CMD for some free GB, run it as admin then type "powercfg -h off"

More advanced methods of freeing up space exist, like reducing the winsxs component store.

[mr120]

This guide worked back then, scan reading it, I think it would still work.

https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...pdated-for-MoP!)

But as Chazus said, its more involved, and would be easier to just clean up anything you can off the ssd -- keep an eye on where browsers download as by windows install default it will be a folder on the ssd.

[Erous]

https://i.gyazo.com/2dcc18fc92a1a1cd...d060b98cd4.png

if i delete the beta it wont affect the original wow install at all right?

Not sure why straight answers are hard to come by. Correct, deleting beta does not affect the original wow install. But like others have said, you have something amiss with your wow install that needs to be cleaned up. It's not feasible to break it up because you'd lose performance in doing so and, in some cases it's not feasible depending on what's moving.

[lockblock]

This guide worked back then, scan reading it, I think it would still work.

https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...pdated-for-MoP!)

The problem with that is all the file containers have no meaningful name like they used to and would be a pain in the ass to figure out which ones to move.

[kaintk]

The problem with that is all the file containers have no meaningful name like they used to and would be a pain in the ass to figure out which ones to move.

and some mod use other folder than only the mod folder, like the game config folder , its always hard to see what to move, the best way to do it is just reinstall a fresh wow but you will have reconfigure all your addon, it is the boring part of it

[DeltrusDisc]

I'm assuming your SSD is also your Windows install drive, so I'd move some of those other games to the HDD just to free up space for a page file.

Games shouldn't be on HDD in this day and age unless they're tiny/ancient. Page files should only be the size of the amount of RAM you have installed. Doubt OP has more than 16GB if they only have a 250GB SSD and 800GB HDD. And even still, if they learn to properly manage their Windows/WoW/other games/programs installation files, that 250GB can go far. Hell, I managed with a 128GB SSD for quite a while, so.

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I play WoW off of my HDD, personally. If you have no space on the SSD, you either have to remove something else to make room for WoW, or move WoW to an HDD. It probably is slower, so if you prefer SSD load speed you should try to avoid it, of course.

Absolutely is slower on a HDD, especially if that HDD is at all old/filled up. SSDs don't show nearly the same wear and tear slowdown that HDDs show from simple time active and being filled up. Check out this video, we love sharing it here!

Even though this video is old (he uses a SATA II SSD!) it still makes the very strong point of how much faster SSDs are than HDDs at loading WoW. Newer videos, you can search for them "SSD vs HDD WoW" will often show WoW loading in under 10 seconds, FULLY, on an SSD. The nice thing about this video though is this guy stops the timer once all the player/NPC characters have loaded, you see the shadow first, but he doesn't stop, he wants to give you an honest review, some people stop it the moment the game exits load screen, which is actually incorrect.



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...uhh, thats a problem. Mines 40. Might want to look to that.

Yes, page 1 is full of people mentioning he needs to take care of that.

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yea i want to have updates and patches go to the hdd while leaving wow on the ssd

Updates and patches are changes to the game files itself, you just need to learn to go in there and clean up the installation. I'm pretty sure the b-net launcher has a cleaning/repair utility that can do this for you. Also, like I said before, drag your screenshots folder to another drive. You should actually be able to automate screenshots being saved to a different drive, too.

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https://i.gyazo.com/2dcc18fc92a1a1cd...d060b98cd4.png

if i delete the beta it wont affect the original wow install at all right?

Correct.

Is bandwidth even a problem? If it's not, just back up your interface, screenshots, and wtf folders, delete WoW, and redownload it. Poof, 60gb of space freed up.

That said, there IS a way to offload a good portion of your files to your HDD, without taking a performance hit, however it's sort of a process. I'd just recommend clearing up that unneeded space first.

PS: I don't know why we keep using the word 'bandwidth'. It's not accurate in... any sense. It just seemed to be the common term peopel are understanding. Data Caps are an issue, maybe.

For people who torrent a lot, absolutely. I believe my house is actually limited to 250GB, maybe, I'm not sure. Thankfully I don't torrent, but I do wonder just how much YouTubing adds up... still haven't hit 250GB though, so whatever!

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You can create a directory junction point for just the datafolder which then puts just that folder on another drive... Wow sees it as part of the c: drive but it could be on any drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point

Make sure wow and the client is disabled then move the data folder to say d:\wow\data then do something like mklink /j "c:\program files (x86)\world of warcraft\data" d:\wow\data

Or you can do what people suggest and move your whole wow folder or buy a new ssd.

Don't do too many junction points and remember what you did so you can recover from them. Don't do junction points for system folders.

I think this should not be advised as the OP is obviously not that technically savvy, and is more likely to screw something up, let's play it the easy and safe way.