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EricHiggin on 25 February 2018
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Intrinsic said:

I guess no matter how fast ssd prices fall its still cheaper to just dolder the nand flash chips on the board regardless. On the plus side they could tailor the speed of such a set up. And technically having the console ship with 1TB of nand flash but no HDD is still an all inclusive package. Some would even-argue that its cleaner.

1TB would probably only allow 6-8 AAA games, but for those who have really great net and high/no caps, it would be a savings to them. For the casual user, it would probably be just enough to get by, but may also push more customers towards physical game purchases. For everyone else, buying an external and plugging it in couldn't be easier (other than the console having one stock obviously). Being able to lock down the consoles specs as much as possible is always a plus in terms of performance.

KBG29 said:

I can get on board with on board storage =). I have no problem grabbing USB3.1 Gen 2 extrenal SSD to expand the storage. If they left an open M.2 NVMe slot inside similar to the PS2's HDD bay, that would be the ultimate to me. 

Having some form of Soild State Storage in PS5 is IMO the most important next gen feature. HDD's have been to slow for 2 generations now, it is time we get rid of that bottleneck.

ALL ABOARD! Probably not worth the extra cost for the base model. This may be something they could use as premium option for the Pro model whenever it arrived. If if were 2 or 3 years down the road again, M.2 drive sizes would be way up and prices would be much lower. 

KBG29 said:
Intrinsic said:

Its just that m.2 ssds will not be beneficial to consoles. So it makes no sense that they add it in.

Games aren't being bottle necked by the speeds of SATA 3 SSDs. Say a HDD takes 20 secs to load al the assets of a level in a game. Switching rom that (~150MB/s) to an SSD (~500MB/s) could drop that to around 10 secs. If we put in an M.2 nvme SSD (~2000MB/s) we only see those speeds improve by about 1/2 secs.... why?

Thats because the SATA SSD was not limited by its speed to begin with. Its limited by its seek times which is basically identical to that of an m.2 drive.

I would like the M.2 format just for the massive size reduction, and the cleanliness it would have over needing an external drive. You can use both NVMe and SATA in the M.2 formfactor, and one port is compatable with both formats.

Also, yes seek times are a big reason when we are only loading 5 - 8 GB. With 32 or 64GB of RAM that extra speed and larger files will make a much bigger difference. I still think their is a lot of understimating going on here with RAM on PS5. Their is this strange idea that we don't need much more RAM, that is far, far from the truth. Cost is the biggest factor as to how much they can add, but their will never not need more and faster memory. Whether PS5 has 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB of RAM, you can be damn sure devs will use every bit of it. 

The cleanliness and size point makes sense, but I just don't see M.2 being enough storage or low enough cost compared to external by then. 

To push for more solid state storage, they will probably have no choice but to hold back on RAM. The opposite way to look at it would be to forget solid state altogether and assume a 2-4TB HDD with 32-64GB of GDDR6.

I guess they could always split the dif and have 250GB flash and 32GB RAM. Separate external USB 3 HDD's. Have enough flash to store at least one major AAA 4k game at a time and then have the RAM pull from that? I dunno, where's Cerny when you need him?