Next Gen Tech (NGT): STORAGE

[SvennoJ]

Pemalite 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.

Not all games load things the same way.
Some games will opt for an extremely large chunky load. Some would prefer to do a smaller load and stream in assets over time.
Some games will take a mixed approach.

Some games use an abundance of compression on it's assets which actually loads into RAM quickly, but takes longer to decompress thanks to the CPU.

Which is why there is such large discrepencies in performance in regards to SSD vs mechanical load times on consoles.

All up to the developer essentially.

That's kind of a nightmare to optimize for nowadays. From disc you always knew how fast you could read data and balance the compression ratio to read speed, and also strategically place the data on the disc. Installed, you have no idea where the data ends up (matters with CAV drives and seek times) and with different HDDs and now SSDs it is impossible to optimize loading times for different scenarios.

Ideally you want read time to be equal to decompression / process time to minimize overall load time. With SSDs less compression and more pre-baked data makes sense, yet that would disadvantage 5400 rpm drives.

Perhaps having different SKUs with HDD and SSD is not a good idea. A good stock drive developers can optimize for would be preferable. Just please don't use 5400 rpm drives again next gen :/