External Hard Drive Support in Beta on Playstation

[Pemalite]

aLkaLiNE said:

Pemalite said:
Finally, Sony has caught up with Microsoft in this aspect.

Interested to see if it will be as elegent as the Xbox One's solution though.
Also keen to see some benchmarks.

What is particularily elegant about external HDD support on X1? Genuinely asking, I know that data loads faster via USB3.0 Bus than a Sata 2 bus. Do you think that Sony might artificially restrict this somehow?

On the Xbox On you can restrict all data to a single drive.
Or you can set a drive as a primary drive and when that is full, the console automagically starts using the next drive and will thus report all storage as a single storage amount. - Great if you have a ton of Downloads in Que set to download over night and you are almost at a drives max limit.

Plus unplugging and moving the data to another console is a seamless plug-and-play experience, with no confuffing about with settings and other garbage.

Plus Microsoft allows you to have saves and such on the external drive, Sony does not.

Microsoft also has double the HDD size support of Sony. (16 Terabytes vs Sony's 8 Terabytes.)
And Microsoft will allow for up to 3x external Hard Drives. (Not sure how many Sony will let you have.)

Sata 2 vs USB 3.0 is irrellevent for transfer rates.
Mechanical drives generally won't use all of the bandwidth on either bus, unless it's a burst-transfer, which might last a second or so on the rare occasion.

Latency is actually better on Sata 2, so should help when it comes to lots of random reads and writes and Sata generally requires less CPU time.