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exdeath on 04 November 2016
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Conina said:
exdeath said:

HDD is primitive garbage that belongs in dumps with reel to reel, cassette, 8 track, floppy, and VHS.  This 1950s magnetic recording has hobbled our technology for far too long.  Say no to the IO bottleneck.

60+ GB/s CPUs and RAM and 1 gig internet and 10-100 gig LAN and we still fucking read/write code and data off a fucking primitive magnetic spindles using magnets at kilobytes per second access speeds.  wtf

 

Even the cheapest 2TB-SSD costs more than 4 times of an 2TB-SSHD (€500+ vs. €120) while an SSHD is only 4% to 40% slower than the SSD (totally depends of the game) running on an PS4. That means that the loading times on an SSD are only 1 to 16 seconds faster (again, that difference totally depends of the game) than on that "primitive garbage"... not very impressive: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-is-it-worth-upgrading-your-ps4-with-an-ssd

And after you started a game and loaded your savegame, further speed differences aren't even there from this point in many titles since the loading of the next level / adjoining areas is already done in the background while watching a cutscene or entering an area. 

So feel free to waste a lot of money if these 1 to 16 seconds loading time are really that important to you... but until the proportion between speed improvement and cost difference doesn't get better, HDDs and SSHDs still have their place.

 

Look at your chart

Ask yourself why do you we even have "load times" in the first place?

A PS4 is capable of 176 GB/s of main memory bandwidth.  Those games are all what, 30 GB?  

60 seconds of "load screen" = 10.5 TB of data moving gone by and an untold several trillion machine instructions.

Why is there a "load time" to load a single level?

Why do we have load times and hour glasses and progress bars at all with the unfathomable speed of modern microprocessor platforms?

Trillions of operations per second and 100s of GB/s of memory bandwidth, why does it take 60 seconds to "load" 900 MB of data every time we open a door or go around a corner?

 

Answer: Everything in our computing world, since the switch from nonvolatile core memory to volatile dynamic RAM in the 1960s, is built around catering to limitations of their primitive nonvolatile 3rd tier storage devices that starve the rest of the system to hundreds of orders of magnitude.  And in the PS4's case an outdated interface spec which only had to accommodate that primitive media rendering improvements even in the form of a compromised SATA II form factor SSD negligible.

It may sound like I'm just being spoiled about having to wait 30 seconds to load a video game but this has far more reaching implications on human technological progress over several decades than just waiting for video games to load.

Every aspect of human technology we interact with is impacted by load times, boot times, resume times, please wait, "in progress", "moving", "copying", "checking for changes", "scanning...", "comparing...", "searching, please wait some more, etc. while the CPU snoozes at 1% load waiting all eternity for a storage controller interrupt, all for the same reason:  Inadequate nonvolatile storage technology.

 Even NAND flash, especially in SATA form factors, is just a stop gap bandaid.