So I’m a little tech savvy but not much. I just saw an article stating SLs will require a solid state drive. I don’t really know what that means…should I be worried? I currently play on an HP laptop that runs the game just fine. Thanks all!
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I think a SSD is required to play WoW right now, trying to load into dalaran or any other city takes forever without one.
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I would recommend getting one. They are a world of difference compared to HD’s as far as speed goes.
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Hell, i can’t play any modern game without it on an SSD, load times are horrendous.
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It seems so. Ssd’s are the norm now and HDD’s can’t keep up. You can look up the differences between the two but basically ssd’s have much faster read/write speeds for processing data. HDD’s are still useful for backup storage, but it looks like ssd’s are going to be required for pc gaming for now on.
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You can get an external one that plugs right into a USB for an affordable price. It’s like night and day in terms of load speed.
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An SSD is a replacement for your HDD, which is where everything gets stored. SSD’s are much faster than HDD’s, which means it’ll likely require one due to the amount of things needing to be loaded at one time.
An SSD is essentially required so Hook Point’s loading screen doesn’t take forever and cause arena teams to lose, as an example. I would recommend one regardless.
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It’s recommended for BfA but not required. The Shadowlands system requirements has it being required.
Honestly, while a SSD is a huge upgrade over a traditional drive for something like WoW, you’ll probably be fine. Load times might get somewhat painful but it shouldn’t be literally unplayable.
I’d recommend upgrading to one but if that’s not an option for whatever reason you likely aren’t SoL outside of niche circumstances.
Here’s the official system requirements for Shadowlands, for the curious.
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Let me put it into numbers for people who don’t really understand the difference it makes.
Loading into a battle in Total Warhammer with an HDD: 1minute
Loading into a battle in Total Warhammer with an SSD: 5 seconds
If you can, get one. You won’t be disappointed.
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Thanks very much for the responses everyone, they were really helpful!
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It’s not just WoW, at this point most games are designed around the assumption that the user is running the game from an SSD. Old style hard drives are so slow in comparison that they’re extremely restrictive and burdensome from a game design perspective.
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I finally broke down and bought them for the computer in our house, loading times are much faster and Dalaran does not take 2 years to get into.
Shadowlands also recommends a 1080…
That’s not an unreasonable recommendation, if the goal is solid 60FPS on high settings. Of course you can always drop some settings and get 60FPS from a 980Ti, 1060, 1070, etc but recommended specs typically aim for that goldilocks zone of good performance without much sacrifice.
i’m doing beta without one if that’s any help. of course there isn’t the volume on beta that the full game will have. so, it will run it fine w/o ssd, your mileage may vary though.
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An ssd just helps the game load faster. Isn’t much use aside from that, since you have a laptop one of your drives should be an ssd drive. I believe it is the C drive but you can double check just google how.
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C is the most common for a boot drive but whether or not she has an SSD really depends on how old the laptop is and how high end it was when it came out.
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Fortunately the price on SSDs has come way down. Pretty much the only games you wouldn’t want to run off of them are ones using procedural world generation like Minecraft. Those kinds of games will eat up the inherent write limit of an SSD in a real hurry.
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SSD’s are so cheap now. I really dont see the problem
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A simplified version is; an SSD basically loads Games faster than a hard drive does.
The bigger more graphically intensive your game is, the longer it will take to load and go between places. SSDs help relive that issue.