Blizzard just updated the system requirements page for World of Warcraft: Shadowlands again to indicate that the highly-anticipated expansion will run with either a solid state drive or an older hard disk drive as a minimum requirement - but they can't guarantee that a player's experience won't suffer from using the much slower HDD.
This updated minimum requirements apply to both the Windows and Mac versions of Shadowlands, requiring 100GB of free space regardless of the type of drive you use. The storage drive listing under the recommended specs is unchanged, though, as Blizzard clearly recommends using a much faster SSD drive.
The minimum requirements don't specify a speed for your SSD, but Blizzard's last World of Warcraft expansion, Battle for Azeroth, lists a 7,200 RPM HDD as its minimum requirement, so the same will likely hold true for their latest expansion due out on October 27.
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The requirements page does state however, that "depending on the performance of the drive, player experience may be impacted on HDD." There has been some talk online that players using only an HDD are be able to do so but suffer from painfully long load times.
Until the expansion is finally released on October 27, though, no system requirements are quite set in stone, so make sure to keep an eye on the expansions requirements page for any updates.
World of Warcraft pre-patch 9.01 expected to release in late September
According to Wccftech, the Shadowlands pre-patch 9.01 that will introduce many of the important gameplay changes – like the level adjustments to existing characters to conform to the new level 60 cap, player customization changes, and the like – will drop sometime in late September, based on past expansion pre-patch schedules.
The most likely date is September 22, though September 29 is another possible date given. With no official word from Blizzard though, those dates are best guesses, not a hard date for the patch to drop.
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