Mr_No said:
Arkaign said:
Something that could have been done on either or both consoles :
Put in 16GB of on-board SSD memory exclusively for the OS itself, along with the most core apps. The expense would have been trivial, and then other apps/games/etc could still be kept on the HDD. It would also make upgrading HDDs easier (OS and profiles stay, just swap the HDD and update everything again without having to backup anything). |
I do like the idea for future instances. That would definitely make the main system apps extremely fast. But I've heard SSD performance degrades after many write cycles. So numerous updates to the system and the OS on that SSD would worsen the performance overtime, no? Correct me if I'm wrong.
The bootup speed was nothing new for me. Since both consoles came out, I noticed how slow the X1 bootup was.
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Hi Mr. No :
SSD Performance does have a limit (well, wear actually). In the earlier days of SSDs it was a big concern, because it was sort of an unknown area largely. There was a lot of worry that consumer drives would wear out quickly after heavy usage.
Luckily, that proved to be largely not a concern after all, there are some tests out there where the drives undertook truly monumental and inhuman repeated write testing, and they passed beyond anyone's brightest expectations. Consoles are much less write intensive than Windows desktop OS'es are, so as long as the TRIM support and provisioning was set up properly, the SSD for the console should last beyond any conceivable length of time that would be a concern, perhaps decades with heavy use (as the OS section would probably see 1/1000th of the write cycles that a typical Windows PC would see in the same timeframe. All games would still be saving to the HDD, so you'd only really write to it when updating the console OS/firmware, and core apps).
That's not to say that problems haven't been discovered with some models over the years, often poor firmware, bad Q/A, etc. The biggest thing overall is that your average SSD is more reliable than your average HDD, as you have zero moving parts to worry about.
I guess it's elementary now though, the chances of this appearing in the current gen are incredibly low, though if MS is indeed pursuing DDR4 for the slim X1 as heavily rumored (DDR3 prices are rising steadily, and will be harming margins badly if they don't get away from it) : then MS could rework their slim to store the OS on an SSD cache. I doubt they will though, maybe .001% chance :(
I think whatever the next consoles are will certainly skip HDDs though.
Anyway, some quick fun reading :
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/17/consumer-grade-ssds-actually-last-a-hell-of-a-long-time/
