What makes you a geek?

[LavCat]

I'm replying to both Lissa and Concillian here. We all know what application is driving this technology: we have to load our textures faster (err, I mean files). As I understand it, WoW stores textures (and other static data) compressed into large .mpq files. As a texture is called for, I can't believe the game engine starts doing a read through the .mpq file. Common sense tells me the texture data must be stored in a manner that it can be accesssed randomly. Does WoW decompress the .mpq files at load time? How exactly does it work? Is random read performance the parameter that we want to maximize?

I could buy an ST3300655LW today (if I had $475.98, which I don't), plug it in, and without any worries about incompatibilities, reasonably expect that it would last five years (I've only ever had one Seagate drive fail in warranty). Or, for about the same price, I could order a small OCZ Colossus that (following the "buy" link to Amazon) "usually ships in one to three months." Would I really see a difference?

Reading the customer reviews for SSD's on Newegg does not give a warm fuzzy feeling.