Hello. I am a long time player of World of Warcraft. I am excited about the upcoming release of Shadowlands. However, I read recently within the minimum requirements description for the new expansion that the game will require a solid-state drive? I have an i7 9700k processor, a 2080 8gb VRAM GPU, and 32gb of RAM. My PC is abundantly capable of operating the game at a high level of efficiency. So I am asking if having the game installed on an HDD, as I always have, will actually cause me issues come October 27? Could you please inform me of whether I have cause for concern? Thank you.
Understand, of course, that a spinning rust hard drive may not yield performance which would be satisfactory to you, @Ugraco. How much loading lag you’re willing to put up with is entirely up to you. But for a lot of folks, the SSD will wind up being subjectively necessary, because the cheaper alternative just won’t be tolerable. (Imagine the worst case: you take so long loading into an instance that you get kicked by an impatient party.)
It’s probably fine and wise and cost-effective to see if your hard drive will load fast enough to satisfy you, but you may want to save up ($50-75) for an SSD to put the game onto.
HDD are fine to use, they are just generally slower than SSD. Only problem it would cause is having loading screens that take longer than other players who use an SSD instead.