Worldcache on a different hard drive
Ok simple 'hack' time, I'm not going to post a 'hold your hand' guide, if you don't know enough to follow my rather simplistic description then you're probably best to avoid messing around with mounting partitions since I'm not taking any responsibility from problems that may arise [;)]
With that condescending remark / disclaimer out of the way, let's get down to business. This will work on any Windows operating system providing you have a decent partition manager (the standard disk manager with Win2K / XP / 2003 / Vista is fine for this).
Take a spare hard drive. Hook it up to a spare SATA / IDE / SCSI interface channel. Works best if the drive has the channel to itself, or if part of a mirrored RAID array that is used for data storage and won't be accessed for any other purpose while Horizons is running.
Create a partition at the start of the disk (data placed at start of disk is read faster since there's more sectors covered per spin on the outer edge of a disk platter) of 2 gig in size, this should be sufficient for two shards with fairly populated worldcache data. If you have worldcache data for more than two shards then increase the partition size by roughly a gigabyte per shard. Format the partition as NTFS and set the cluster size around half of the default recommendation when doing this. If you don't like messing with cluster sizes then this isn't essential, it simply helps save a bit of space considering the type of data that will be stored on the partition. Give the partition a label of something like 'HZData' or 'WorldCache'. Assign a spare drive letter to the partition for now.
Move the contents of your worldcache folder to the new partition. You don't need to recreate the worldcache folder in the root of the partition, consider that the partition is your worldcache folder ! Once the data is copied across, pad out the MFT to double what it currently is. Now use something slightly better than the defragmenter that comes with Windows 2K / XP and set a boot time defragmentation that will consolidate the MFT and the folder file on the worldcache partition. Reboot and monitor the boot time defragmentation to ensure that the folder file is fully defragmented. Once this is done, continue back to Windows and defragment the partition normally.
Make sure that the worldcache folder in your Horizons directory is completely empty (it should be, if you forgot to copy anything across then you're gonna hate waiting while the defragmentation procedures described above have to be performed a second time [:P]) then mount the worldcache partition directly into the worldcache folder in your Horizons folder. To verify that the partition is mounted properly, use Windows Explorer and browse to the worldcache folder in your Horizons directory. Viewing the contents of the folder should be exactly the same as it was before you started this whole 'hack' thingy. You might notice that instead of a folder icon, the worldcache folder now has a disk icon because it is mapped directly to the worldcache partition you created.
Now fire up Horizons and experience a slightly smoother game ! We're not talking about raising your frames per second, but it certainly makes the game a lot smoother in situations with high disk activity. This probably won't make any difference if you only have one hard drive, or if you have multiple drives sharing the same channel on your disk controller, but if you have the luxury of spare channels and a spare disk, then you might be pleasantly surprised [H]
