High disk usage in WoW

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1

I have noticed lately that when I use a portal, a mage port, or hearth, it takes a considerable time to do it - and when I took a look at my Task Manager screen, I saw during these events I was almost always showing between 95% and 100% disk usage.

Can anyone tell me why this would be happening. I’m not aware of this sort of event happening during other computer activities.

2

Hey there Kneeshooter,

When you take a portal or do anything to encounter a loading screen there’s definitely going to be some time spent from the game reading data files from the harddrive. Since WoW is such a large game it can’t load all of the zones/maps at once, and that’s basically the reason for loading screens. The game will load and cache information from the data files which are stored on your harddrive, and it will try to do this as quickly as the drive allows.

Often we see long loading screen times from players who have older mechanical harddrives (HDDs) due to the slower harddrive read/write speeds on those drives. If you really want to speed things up and make your loading screens much faster you may want to look into upgrading to a solid-state drive (SSD) which has much faster read/write speeds.

TLDR: This is perfectly normal and expected when loading in a new zone. :slight_smile:

3

OK thanks for that info. The hard drive isn’t all that old but I will look into the SSD option.

4

Or I could just play one of the 300 other games who don’t pass off expenses to their customers.

Upgrade your architecture. Hire engineers to fix it. It’s ancient. I’m using a $3,000 Alienware computer and can’t load a 15 year old zone sometimes. Your game is the ONLY game with this issue. Fix it. I’m not going out to grab a $5,000 system so I can load a 2010 gnome. There are other games with 2023 gnomes that load fine.

5

Alienware is trash. Buy the parts separate. Any pre built is trash.

6

Bit of a necro action going on here…

My original issue with this post was concluded ages ago when I had a SSD installed. Anyhow, I ticked Solution so that has presumably fixed that.