Next Gen Tech (NGT): STORAGE

[MajorMalfunction]

shikamaru317 said:

Pemalite said:

They might not even bother with a Hybrid drive.
Next gen they will go with whatever is cost effective for the capacity, that is likely to still be mechanical disks rather than more expensive Hybrid drives or SSD's.

However... They could include a few gigabytes of SLC NAND as a cache on the motherboard, but I highly doubt even that.

I don't know if they will, but they definitely should. Load times have been ridiculous this gen, some games have as much as 2 minute loads, and the average load time for an open world game is over 30 seconds. I can only imagine they'll be worse next gen due to needing to load 4K textures and higher polygon character models. Some form of cache, either integrated into the motherboard or via an SSHD seems like a bare necessity to me, I will hesitate to buy into next gen if they don't at least give us some cache. Considering an SSHD only costs about 20% more than a standard 7200rpm drive of the same size but improves load times by as much as 50%, it would be a relatively cheap way to improve load times next gen.

I'm hoping for a hybrid solution:  128 GB M2 on the motherboard as a cache and SATA3 1TB mechanical drive, or an SSHD. IMO, next gen needs at least 32GB of RAM to not be outdated on day 1. 64 GB would be preferred, if it's a viable option. Keep recently played games on the M2 drive and load the rest from the mechanical drive. If they don't, load times will be even worse next gen, with 4K textures (a 4x increase) and higher polycount models.