Next Gen Tech (NGT): STORAGE

[Bofferbrauer2]

KBG29 said:

Pemalite said:

Except it doesn't.

Because Sata can be used for SSD's and Mechanical Hard Drives, regardless if it is Sata 1 or Sata 3.2.

If it has M.2 they might just use it as a cache drive.

This is a possible compromise they may have to make. I could see early units coming with something like a 4GB SATA 3 HDD and an 256GB M.2 Chip, both user upgradeable. By the time the PS5 slim arrives, they could drop the SATA bay, and just offer an 8TB M.2 chip for the same price.

If they went this route everything would be developed around the M.2 speeds, with the HDD loading everything to the M.2 drive before executing. They would need some smart storage tech to handle all of the transfering. Probably keep the start up data for around 5 games, and leave the rest of the drive open to grab the full files once a game is selected.

Anyway we cut it, a true next gen console needs an absolute minimum of an 8x increase in CPU + GPU, RAM Size and Speed, and Storage Size and Speed. For a true next gen expereince, and not just a 4K PS4/XBO expereince we have to have Solid State Storage in one way or another. If large size Solid State drives are to expensive at launch, this may be the way they have to go. As I said earlier, another gen built around the limitations of a 2.5" HDD is basically a death sentence for consoles. Everything will come with SSD by 2022, meaning stuff like Apple TV or Amazon Fire TV could become much better gaming machines than PS5/XBO. Sony definitly is not going to risk the PlayStation brand on an underwhelming PS5.

An 8TB M.2 Chip would even in 2023 cost way too much for a console, though I could see an M.2 or possibly even U.2 slot (basically the sucessor of SATA (Express)) for storage upgrades by then. For high storage spaces HDDs will stay on top for a while as Flash will stay expensive. For comparision's sake a 4TB HDD (I had a hard time finding an 8TB SSD) costs little over 100$, a 4TB SSD? over 1500$! The difference is just too big for a console, which are on a tight budget

Also, to cram as much Flash memory storage on a M.2 is potentially risky: The smaller the production of Flash memory in nm, the shorter the life expectancy of it's cells. But to get that much memory into the small arry of chips on an M.2 means you'll need to produce them in 7 or even 5nm, at which point the write cycles are in the hundreds if no major change in the hardware is done by then. The big size will mitigate it, but once the M.2 is close to full every save can become deadly to it's cells. And due to electron migration (which gets common at such small distances), it may not even need those saves for the cells to die. While there are successors to Flash in the works or even released (3D X-Point) who don't have that problem or to a much smaller degree, these will be even more expensive than Flash (3D X-point for instance costs about 5 times as much as Flash memory on their cheapest!)

Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV use Flash (=/= SSD!) because they use much less storage space, more in the line of the Switch (which also uses Flash Memory), and because a HDD would be too bulky for them. But that doesn't make them any faster (well, they can load a bit faster, but certainly won't run faster, and certainly nowhere near a console