Another standard HDD won't fix the problem, but don't toss your drives. The symlink method for the data folder is the correct way to do it. USB flash drives most likely won't help (they're WAY too slow), and I haven't come across any real conclusions from using the Vista ReadyBoost feature yet. I'll make a thread after running tests on the SSD drive I've ordered.. to give people a better idea of the cost/benefit of going that route. If the benefit is there, I may delay the review until I test two of them with a dedicated RAID0 controller. Right now they're expensive, even for the cheaper/slower (but still WAY faster than any standard spindle HDD for our random reads in WoW) MLC models (~$200 for 32GB).

Although warm, 50*C is within spec for a Q6600 at full load. Don't worry about it.. 55-60* I'd start to get concerned..

I'm sure some of the problem has to do with the requirements handed down to WoW developers from the producers. Bliz games are pretty strict about not requiring the latest hardware to run, so I wouldn't be surprised if they sacrificed some performance by not caching data as much as they should, especially for our modern machines with tons of available memory. I work on military simulations with miles of high-detail terrain polygons with entity counts in the 1000's. Maintaining real-time performance and holding true to precision accuracy is a very fine line to balance, and it usually requires expanding to faster/more hardware once you hit the optimization wall. When you're so severely limited on your hardware requirements, as all Bliz games have been, you have to either sacrifice performance or quality. Remember how nasty 800x600 Diablo 2 looked? People complained about the horrible resolution during beta, but the quality had to be sacrificed to get decent performance on older machines. It's just a shame that there isn't more of an expandible architecture used when designing these games.. something I have to always consider at work since hardware does change over time.