For folks with older computers, Western Digital makes a 2TB portable external SSD that is compatible with USB 2+3 as found on many older machines.
It’s on Amazon for $65 US.
https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Elements-Portable-External/dp/B06W55K9N6/ref=psdc_595048_t2_B07VP5X239
If your connection is USB2, I strongly recommend an internal replacement instead of an external drive.
While I agree, a lot of older USB 2 era laptops can’t accommodate an internal SSD.
That should only be the case for laptops that can’t take replacement hard drives.
There may be edge cases where the firmware throws up when attached to high-speed media, but those should be pretty rare.
Just as a point of reference, I have a 7-8 year old laptop (Core I7) I use to play WOW when I travel, and last year I replaced the spinning HDD with an SSD without any issues.
I agree this “requirement” seems a little strange to me.
I thought it could be them trying to move people off using FAT32 file systems but without seeing Blizzard’s stats on what players have installed I can’t say how likely that hypothesis is or not.
FAT32 was a thing with Windows 98 installs which hasn’t been supported by Microsoft since 2006 IIRC. From Windows XP and up it’s all been NTFS. There’s also the possibility (not sure how viable) that there are people operating FAT32 Hard Drives with Windows 7 and above.
But then again AFAIK you can use FAT32 on a single state drive ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Argh… I can play Beta just fine but I don’t meet the min Graphics requirements on my laptop. Sadness.
I do have the SSD at least. Clone drive + buying a bigger new SSD once prices came down FTW. Might look into that external drive too. The prices are now reasonable.
Oh the subscriptions they are gonna lose… companies tried this in the 90’s and lost millions because people wont pay big bucks just to play game (esp one they have played 15 years without being forced to upgrade their pcs)… not to mention the fact we are in the middle of a medical and economic crisis in America…
What were they thinking??? Or were they thinking???
Shadowlands has been in development for years. The issues with the pandemic have only been for months. If they changed Shadowlands because of the pandemic it would push the release date back months. The final part of development started before lockdown.
dooooom and gloooom! 
I heard the same complaints before when Blizzard dropped Windows 98 support.
Perhaps if you actually read the thread, you would find out if you can run the current PTR, you can run Shadowlands. Not having a SSD is not gonna lock you out of the game.
FAT32 isn’t used by default in any version of Windows that is currently supported. It’s only default for very low capacity USB flash drives. Windows 10 will default to exFAT for most USB flash drives and NTFS for all SSDs.
The more likely reason for Blizzard stating this is the “required minimum” is the sheer number of complaints they get about slow loading screens and loads in general with regard to CASC enabled games. After so many patch cycles, CASC gets fragmented enough that it really bogs down on platter based drives and the only workaround, and only in the short term, is to uninstall and reinstall or do a double-clone of the drive where you clone to another drive temporarily, format the original drive, and clone back to the original, since this will force files to be written in as contiguous a manner as possible.
On the Mac side, SSDs are essentially required because of the combination of APFS’ enumeration problem combined with CASC’s fragmentation issues. SSDs are literally the only thing propping up APFS right now, and even then players have to reinstall the game from time to time simply because the enumeration + fragmentation issue is bad enough that it can bring even mighty NVMe drives to their knees. Remember, all SSD drives’ Achille’s Heel are the random 4k R/W IOPS, especially at Queue Depth 1. This will be the case until I/O workloads become properly multithreaded, which they haven’t yet for most OSes and apps outside of specific benchmarks.
Yes, you actually can. It’s not easy to do, but it is possible. But the only reason you’d do that is if you were using it as a data drive in a Windows XP machine. Outside of that, there is literally zero benefit to doing so.
At least your desktop meets the requirements as it has a GTX 970 in it. If your laptop supports an eGPU, that could be used, but I don’t think it does given its age (and the fact almost nobody outside Apple used Thunderbolt 3 for the longest time).
1:. Probably due to loading times since Warlords. SSD becoming minimum requirements doesn’t mean it won’t work, and others have noted it will, but it probably won’t be supported.
This upgrade won’t break the bank, and could even make your PC start up faster.
Ill be seeking a refund too. I purchased this game with the understanding I would actually be able to play it. and no I wont be buying something else to be able to play. This information should have been released before preorders were allowed. Shady business I say.
I am in the beta and I can play the game fine on my laptop. No SSD drive.
This information has been available since at least December 2019.
I’m fairly confident it was on the Blizzard Shop under System Requirements when pre-orders started but I can 100% confirm that our support article created in December 2019 has always had the information.
I expect we’re seeing a more recent increase in discussion because we announced the release date last week and gaming media is doing their rounds in preparation.
I went and bought a 500GB external SSD and transferred my WoW files to it. So far it’s very slow the first time I load into a zone but after that first load screen, when I jump between areas I’ve visited the loading is very fast.
Brother is in beta. He doesn’t really notice anything. Of course his real gaming computer is much faster than his old laptop from 2015, but the laptop ran it just fine.
When I got two 500gb SSDs I believe it cost me about $250 a year or two ago. I think you can get them pretty cheap if you wanted to upgrade. Even the older ones from 6-8 years ago still work fine. I gave my two old 250gb SSDs I had in my prev computer back from 2012 - 2018 and they work just fine, and are still fast… Boot computer in 10 seconds, as opposed to the 6 seconds it takes mine to boot.
Yeah… I wouldn’t go external if I could help it.
IMO external drives are just for when you need a lot of storage space and not necessarily accessing it all the time.
And USB 2.0, I wouldn’t be using that for active transfers like running game files.
If you don’t have 3.0, I wouldn’t even consider it.
Did you even read the thread? Shadowlands will run fine on the HHD. Download the PTR to make sure. It’s the 9.0 client.
You will be able to play. HDDs will work just fine. They just won’t work as well as a SSD because the game is being optimized to work on Solid State from now on.