Quote Originally Posted by 'Xzin',index.php?page=Thread&postID=53213#post5321 3
SOME SSD read times are faster than a HD. The SATA or IDE doesn't really matter much. People confuse bandwidth with practical throughput. A hard drive will push ~40 MB per second. A SSD can push 60 or 70 in some cases, though writing will be slower. The SSD will have far better access times than a hard drive. All told, a SSD > hard drives for WoW.

All told, a SSD will be better but in practice, the difference unless you had 5 SSDs and enough bandwidth (meaning multiple SATA channels) is going to be fairly slight for a fairly hefty (as of 2008) cost versus a single hard drive.
My current motherboard support 6 SATA channels split on 2 different controllers all at 3GB speeds. More than anything the type of memory used has the biggest impact in performance, if it is single or multi layer. Single is slower read, faster write than multi layer which is cheaper (more dense) and is more failure prone (one bad block kills the layered cluster). No performance tests that I've seen show sequential reads and writes vs a normal drive since nobody wants to show their product is worse than the old tech it's trying to replace. Random reads are the "bread and butter" of this tech which is why it's good for WoW and will never replace a normal enterprise solution for data storage.