The minimum system requirements for the upcoming "World of Warcraft" expansion have been revealed: 100 GB of storage space is required, which is a lot (but still not far from the maniacal 200+ GB requirement for "Modern Warfare"), but more importantly, Blizzard requires that storage capacity in SSDs.

SSDs, or solid state drives, are great because they are significantly faster than traditional hard drives. But that performance literally comes at a price: as noted in a recent HDD vs. SSD comparison, solid state drives cost more than four times as much as hard disk drives of the same capacity.

Solid state drives are much cheaper now than they used to be, but the price difference is still substantial enough that some PC gamers (myself included) have decided to use smaller SSDs for installing and running Windows and the occasional game, and for photos and storage that take longer to load and Some people end up running two drives, a huge HDD for whatever they have lying around that doesn't drive them crazy if it takes a while to load, such as photos or storage. Therefore, it is a bit unusual for them to be included in minimum system requirements like this one:

Minimum

Recommended

Unlike components such as RAM and video cards, which, if they are not sufficient, may prevent the game from running downright, Reddit's such The general consensus in the thread is that Shadowlands runs off the hard drive. Load times will be longer and texture pop-in will be more pronounced, but if you really want to play Shadowlands, you shouldn't have to buy an SSD.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands releases on October 27, which gives you less than two months to talk yourself into buying an SSD. (If you're ready to shop around, be sure to check out our guide to the best NVMe SSDs you can buy right now, including the best SSDs for gaming, inexpensive SSDs, and more powerful options.

Thanks, Wowhead.