The new minimum requirements for Shadowlands are out…and solid state storage is now a minimum requirement for WoW. Will an external SSD be good enough???
I would imagine. It’s still an SSD. 
An external ssd is going to cost as much an an internal one.
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I have to wonder why it is required. Been in beta a while and working off of my HDD with no issues. Load times are no longer than they were before.
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Two things:
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You WILL still be able to play WoW on an HDD. Take it from an IT guy. You really should get a solid state drive because it makes a world of difference but you will not have to have one. Just expect long loading screens.
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If you do buy one, get an internal drive. It will perform much better than an external one. You can get a 500gb PNY SSD off of Amazon for like $50.
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You don’t need an SSD. But you should probably have one. It’s one of the best upgrades you can give your PC for the price. Memory is pretty cheap.
Edit: If your motherboard supports M.2 memory, you should use it. My HTPC uses a 7200RPM HDD and takes about 30sec to get to load to the desktop login page, and with my main PC I can be AFKing in Orgrimmar about 30sec after turning on my PC.
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Getting an SSD was one of the biggest performance boosts I’ve had to the game in a while. Much faster loading, and no more getting into the game and having objects pop in as they are loaded, too. I recommend it, if you can afford to get one.
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If I got one how would the best way to go about transferring windows to it from the hdd?
Clone it using a free software like Macrium Reflect. Sometimes the SSDs will actually come with free cloning software too.
Cloning software is usually super easy to use but there are video guides on YouTube if you’re afraid you’ll mess it up.
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+1 to Macrium
If you’re not comfortable with it, just slap all your personal files to a USB drive and do a clean install of Windows on the SSD. Then copy the files from the USB drive to the new drive.
Side note → Slap the OS and any of your favorite games to the SSD. But you can keep your old HDD as a slave drive and store your music, videos, photos, etc, on that drive instead. (HDD works great for mass storage of small files; SSD works great for larger files and programs [especially video games.) You will need to reformat the drive (wipe it clean), but it’s a great way to recycle your existing parts.
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For a laptop though…you would have to get an external SSD though right???..is it worth it in your opinion???
Depends on the memory is installed. If you can get an SSD with the same form-factor as your HDD, it’s then just a matter of replacing the drive. Swapping out a hard drive is literally the easiest part of the process, the hardest part is just opening the cast laptop case without doing minor cosmetic damage.
Laptops almost exclusively your 2.5" form factors.
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It depends on the laptop. Usually you can simply replace the HDD with the SSD, though you would likely need a SATA to USB converter to initially plug the drive in to clone your current drive before you actually replaced it.
Those adapters usually run about $10.
I would seriously not recommend an external drive for your game library though.
My loading screens and texture/character loading times had gotten so bad I was forced to switch to a SSD. WoW is definitely getting harder to load. It was something like 2-5 minutes for the first load, and then 30 seconds to a minute to load models and textures. The loading lag was practically unplayable on certain characters and getting slower with each day. It has been much slower with BFA than with Legion, and Legion slower than WoD, etc.
That they are requiring SSD now tells me it’s going to get even worse.
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Can confirm. My computer was running slow in general, loading screens were ridiculously long and reboots took ~5 minutes. I switched to an SSD and everything is super smooth, loading screens are super short and restarting my computer takes about 30 seconds. 100% worth it.
SSD is pretty standard these days. I think they’ve been in low-end PCs and laptops for 4-5 years now? Some companies try to sell these massive 2-4TB hard drives touting fast speeds, but the truth is a single 500GB SSD is better in almost every possible way, including resistance to drops, data speeds, and practical use. (If you need more than 1TB of memory, just get an external drive for mass storage.)
Sounds like you had more wrong than just a HDD to be honest.
WoW is completely playable on a HDD. A friend of mine used one until just recently when I gave him an old SSD of mine. It just takes longer to load but once it has, it’s fine.
Granted, the reason I gave him an SSD is because I was tired of waiting about a minute for him to load into a dungeon when I did so in a few seconds… 
Anyway, point is, WoW doesn’t know if it’s installed on an SSD or not. Storage is storage as far as it is concerned. Blizzard should really put SSD in recommended.
Personally I just run multiple drives. 1tb nvme boot drive, 2tb SSD for games and a 4tb HDD for mass storage and old games that aren’t slowed down by an HDD–like Age of Empires, for example.
Also have a NAS and cloud storage though.
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When I started getting disconnected during long load screens, I knew it was time to put games on an SSD.
SSD has felt like a requirement since Legion.