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fillet on 13 April 2013
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SvennoJ said:
ethomaz said:

SvennoJ said:

And more. It's a 6x CAV drive which is better for seek times but read times are 2.4x slower when reading the inside of the disc.

6x CAV ps4 = 216 mbps / 27 MBs at the outer edge to 90 mbps / 11.25 MBs at the inner edge
2x CLV ps3 = 72 mbps / 9 MBs anywhere on the disk, seek times are much worse as the rotational speed has to change.

Don't worry too much about a loud drive, it doesn't spin that much faster then the ps3 drive at full speed (~4900 rpm vs ~3900 rpm). However it will always spin at that speed.

HDD install will be even more essential next gen to feed all that ram efficiently. The blu-ray drive will be better able to help this time with the lower seek times and the much faster outer track. 1st party games will benefit by using both hdd and optical drive. Use 1 layer for a fast initial install at 27MBs, use the other layer for fast data access while playing, and use the slower parts of the disc for fmv and background loading.
The question is whether 3rd party devs are going to bother since the next xbox is rumored to always do a full hdd install. Why optimize for disk plus hdd use if it's easier to have 1 version for both disc and digital distribution?

The 6x CAV kinda puts my hopes down for a 4K disc format to run on ps4. 90 mbps is not fast enough for disc quality 4K. Maybe in a couple years a ps4 slim will feature a 12x CAV drive for 4K disc playback. (max speed is about 10,000 rpm) (And it will need to be able to read 8 layer 200 GB discs ofcourse...)

I think no game will have HDD install in next gen for PS4... well the only first party game to use install is GT5.

And the PS3 uses a slow 5400 HDD that performs worst than a 5400 HDD in PC... It really get me crazy to install a 1GB game.

The problem with the PS3 is the terribly slow file system, it took my ps3 over an hour to delete Resistence 3 game data. Pressing info to find out what size a game occupies can take a full minute on certain games. Some installs and deletes are fast, some put tons of little files on the hdd and are horribly slow. Hopefully they'll fix that.

And yes it might make more sense to use a couple of GB of ram for 'disk' cache instead of using the HDD. Use all 3, virtual ram drive for cache, hdd install, bd streaming. Probably need all 3 to keep load times down.

The real problem is that all data on the PS3 is encrypted on the disk, so you have many thousands of files like with Resistance 3 (lol we've all been there trying to delete that game data!) ;) an antiquated file system not suited to massive numbers of small files, and stupid developers who didn't see fit to pack the small files into containers.

This is largely a problem that the developers can resolve and there is no excuse in the case of Resistance 3 as there are common formats available for PS3 developers to pack files into (not compressed, simply used to store the files in bundles, sorry very layman talk but I know this to be true).

The file system drive is also very badly coded and not optimized, for example it's impossible to get more than 10-12MBs over the USB2.0 connection on the PS3.

The parts that Sony are responsible for all stem from the extreme modular protection on the PS3 itself. The PS3 has some amazingly crazy obsfucation protections in place compared to say the Xbox 360, on the PS3 there's countless keys and a mad capped chain of trust that beggers belief in it's complexity, but more so inefficiency. However these protections come at a cost in some areas and Sony aren't as good at coding efficiency as they are formulating the protections (certainly not as efficient as Microsoft).

Obviously it's preferential to have a system that isn't hacked (as the PS3 wasn't for a long time sure everyone is aware) Vs a low over head protection, but the PS3 has both complexity and inefficiency for it's operating system.

Take for example the Microsoft "Games on Demand", those games are packed into 160MB chunks which are placed on your hard drive, so no game will ever have more than 50 files and entries in the file system. The encryption/protection is done on the file level and the whole hard drive isn't encrypted. On the PS3 the actual files are encrypted as well as the file system itself.

If you FTP into a PS3 to view the files on the flash/hard drive it's immediately obvious even to someone who can't code that it's a scattered mess, on the Xbox 360 it is clean and sorted.

It goes without saying that Sony will have learned from this though since the OS was designed more than 5 years ago and obviously they will be all to aware of file system inefficiency from feedback from developers and so forth.