Why the SSD is a big deal for PS5, Series X.

[Pemalite]

padib said:

Pemalite said:

padib said:
Why is an SSD a big deal with the next consoles? It's been around for an eternity and is not particularly expensive. Franckly it should've been defacto in the PS4/X1

500GB-1TB SSD's were allot more expensive in 2013.

I would have rather the Playstation 4 and Xbox One actually include a 7200rpm mechanical disk rather than a crappy, slow 5400rpm drive that offers 40-50MB/s of sustained sequential reads... Bonus is that pretty much every USB 3.0 external hard drive was an upgrade.

SSDs back then were approx 70c per gig, rapidly declining in price. It didn't have to be 500GB, that's a lot of space,  a 150GB SSD could've worked in a starter pack. At ~100$, it's a good design move to ensure a big jump in data access speeds. Even another alternative: a 150GB SSD + 420GB 7200rpm drive would've been great.

My point is just that the PS's SSD is making noise, when it is such an easy upgrade nowadays and honestly barely needs to be mentioned as a feature. It's to be assumed nowadays that machines use SSDs or flash memory to propel software.

And Mechanical HDD's were 0.08 cents per gig verses 68 cents per gig on an SSD.

It's clear why they opted for a mechanical drive to start with.

A 150GB~ SSD wouldn't have been viable... Remember the OS/Reserved portion of the drive is a total 138GB on the Xbox One and the PS4 took a big chunk for the OS as well.

If you are suggesting a cache drive... That would have increased the bill of materials substantially, suddenly you need more interfaces to drives on the SoC/Chipset, more motherboard traces, more power delivery and you increase the complexity of the system which can result in more failure points theoretically.

Microsoft did release an Xbox One variant with an SSHD for what it was worth...

But in my opinion the 8th gen should have used 7200rpm drives from the outset with 120MB/s transfer rates rather than absolutely terrible 5400rpm drives which might do 50MB/s on a good day.

DonFerrari said:

Yes it is, even X1X being premium didn't put SSD on it.

And devs when talking to Cerny about what they wanted most being SSD but knowing it was impossible because consoles are made under very tight budgets (reason why they also didn't increase RAM significantly).

Even with the Xbox One X, it was a missed opportunity not to include a much faster 7200rpm HDD... Microsoft touted an upgrade to the SATA interface as some "new measure" to unlock extra performance, but that wasn't it... It helped during burst transfers which occurs when reading data from the Hard Drives Ram, but that was about it.

It was the faster Seagate 5400RPM drive that almost doubled sequential reads/writes in the Xbox One X, Microsoft could have taken it a step further still.