Background download increased (WoW 3.0)

[Concillian]

Hi,
Sort of a thread hijack. Do you run two full copies of WoW, or do you put some stuff on one machine and then just point to it from the other.

The reason I'm asking is that Magi and I have ended up with three (soon to be four) copies of WoW (but only two accounts:)). That makes keeping everything updated a chore. I have a bunch of older computers that would do fine as file servers, and I was thinking about putting the WoW WTF and AddOns on the server and accessing them using shortcuts. I don't know about the remaining files. So, if you (or anyone) has done or tried something similar, I'd like to know how it worked, what the gotchas are, etc.

--Pete

I used to run wow from my file server, but even over gigabit it just was rather noticeably slower than local install. Now I just periodically copy my wow folder to the file server. Though I have no shortage of storage. Being able to use thte file server for MP3, video, etc... means that the client machines can be reasonably lean in terms of storage. I'm finally getting rid of my old 15k SCSI drives (yeah, 15k, but noisy as hell and 5 or 6 years old now, so they aren't as nice as they sound). But I haven't felt squeezed on either machine, and these are only 70 gig drives (though each machine has a second drive for swap, but these are pretty much not useed for anything else.

File server was running a RAID 5 stripe across 4 drives that could stream across the network at essentially full gigabit speeds when I did initial testing (something I couldn't achieve drive to drive on a client machine). I presume that the game issues were due to some latency issues or something? I don't know for sure, just know my plan didn't work out as I had wanted. Due to not being able to run apps from the file server as I had wanted, I'm switching to a mirror on daily backups with no RAID, as performance is no longer a requirement, and I'd rather have the extra data security.