Tech support verified what Silencer has been saying all along, that when you encounter a new player you have to load that players textures, in other words wow only loads what it needs to based upon who is near or in your field of vision. That means when you encounter 100 new players you in fact do make tons of accesses, which means that access time is more important then transfer rate which makes media with low access times supeior for wow then media with higher access times and higher bandwidth.

Whats so complex about that.

Ya you can play well in a low populated zone with a single normal hard drive. But go into a big city in WotLk and see 200 new people and see what happens.