Next Gen Tech (NGT): STORAGE

[Intrinsic]

shikamaru317 said:

SvennoJ said:
What's holding current consoles back from making more use out of SSDs?

I wonder why the gains are generally pretty small compared to HDD. The 5400 rpm drive in the consoles probably don't do more than 80 MB/s. an SSD should be at least 3 times faster even on Sata 2. Load times are faster, yet not that much faster.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-ps4-pro-ssd-upgrade-does-sata-3-make-a-difference
Some games do load almost twice as fast though, others hardly benefit.

If HDDs are still the cheaper option I hope there will be 2 SKUs at launch. SSD option next to HDD. Although that might be confusing to the average consumer, 500GB SSD for 499, 2TB HDD for 399 at launch.

As I recall, Digital Foundry said something about the motherboard being a limiting factor preventing proper SSD speeds even over SATA 3 on PS4 Pro. I seem to recall them saying that XB1 X doesn't have that same limitation, though we'll have to wait for their SSD tests with XB1 X to see if  XB1 X does allow proper SSD speeds. 

Yes thats because on the PS4 the I/O bus is basically a SATA 2 lane. That means that anything you conect to that bus will be sharing that 600MB/s max limit. 

Ideally, that bus should have been a PCIE bus which would have meant that all connected devices have a pool of 4GB/s (depending on what kinda PCIE lane is used) to share from. But those PCIE lanes makes the MB cost more to make.