Lots of people here pissing on something without doing the necessary research first. While we don't know detailed performance data from this drive, there's little doubt that it will outperform any conventional consumer NAND SSD today. Why?
- 12 NAND channels rather than 4 (cheap drives) or 8 (premium drives), allowing for more parallelism both for sequential and random operations
- custom hardware blocks to handle encryption/decryption and other frequent data juggling tasks, offloading the CPU
- games being made for this storage architecture rather than a generalized one (that needs to work on both HDDs and SSDs), meaning dramatic reductions in duplicate data being spread across the drive for easier access, shrinking file sizes and optimizing for on-the-fly asset streaming (which would be entirely possible on a PC, but would require developers to either require an NVMe drive as a base spec, or make several different installations based on what storage media is used - in other words, this isn't happening)
While this still doesn't reach the limits of PCIe 4.0 x4, and will likely be caught (at least in pure sequential numbers) in the next generation of m.2 SSDs (which is why Sony states that you'll be able to expand storage with a certified drive once they arrive), it's nonetheless faster than anything on the market today.
And don't come dragging Optane, Z-NAND or any of that nonsense - one of those drives half the capacity of the 825GB PS5 SSD will cost you more than the whole PS5, making the entire comparison invalid.
One thing this SSD will also bring is lower storage requirement for games. On HDDs a lot of assets were duplicated as the access times were awful, so in order to not have loading screens every 5 minutes or slow loading textures, or just assets failing to load in time, it was easier for the devs to just copy/paste. It's something that has been going on since the CD days (especially since the cd/dvd drives in consoles werent the fastest things around at the time and ram was fairly small)
Yep, and it's pretty ridiculous how bad it gets. One of the few parts I liked from that terrible Mark Cerny presentation was when he was talking about ... was it trash cans in Spider Man? How there were several thousand copies of that asset in various files in the installation as the seek time of the HDD would otherwise have made the entire game an unplayable stuttery mess every time it needed to fetch that asset (which is in pretty much every part of the game map grid).
HELLO Sony, this is 1990 calling and we want all our proprietary, one trick pony devices back, like, yesterday !
Secret sauce my a*s.... this is merely a way for Sony to prevent anyone from swapping out their drives for a newer/bigger drive of their choosing....
It would seem that they now regressing into an Apple-like 90's crapfest, making in-house proprietary sh*t that only works in their stuff .. what a dick move...
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It's still going to support standard NVMe m.2 drives as expansions, with the CPU and other silicon handling virtualization of the additional priority tiers. Nothing shitty about this whatsoever. To expand the storage, all you'll need is an m.2 drive fast enough. They haven't clarified whether only certified drives will work or not, but the phrasing implied that any fast enough drive
should work.
