When we are considering the common domestic form of network attached storage which is becoming more prevalent in households every day, are we not simply adding further processing between source data and memory in the form of network and application level protocols and therefore encouraging increased latency and introducing new potential bottlenecks?

Considering the intensely bursty nature of wow's read requests my gut feeling would be to stick with direct attached storage but I would be very interested to see how joe bloe's acme nas handles five instances of wow loading into dalaran. Gigabit would be a must, I reckon.