Microsoft will allow manufacturers other than Seagate to make Xbox expansion cards

[Pemalite]

ArchangelMadzz said:

Pemalite said:

Yes there are plenty of ways.

PS5 Doesn't have any ports faster than 10gbps so you'd have to still open the side panel and get some kind of M.2 extender which at that point just slide the thing off and put one in xD 

I mean, the Playstation 5's hardware is done and dusted at this point.

My point was there are plenty of ways Sony could have approached this issue.

10Gbps is 1.25GB/s. Definitely not enough bandwidth for a 5.5GB/s SSD... You would need 40Gbps or more... And only External PCI-E and technologies that piggy-back off PCI-E like Thunderbolt can manage that.

Hiku said:

The PS5 SSD was described to process data at 5.5 GB/s decompressed, and 9 GB/s compressed.
I find no mention of difference in read/write speeds. If that means that they are the same, then the Samsung 980 Pro may not work in a PS5 because it is listed at 7 GB/s read, and 5GB/s write.
And I can't find any info on how it handles compressed data. So I'm guessing that's handled by the PS5's SSD controller perhaps?

If that's the case then the issue would be the Samsung drive's write speed being slightly below. Especially since Sony said we'd need NVMe drives a bit faster than the one in PS5 to make up for the difference in true priority levels, etc.

The compression technology of the SSD in the Playstation 5 isn't on the SSD itself, it's off the SSD and a part of the SoC/chipset.
So any SSD that can match or exceed the Playstation 5 will automagically gain that compression technology added onto it in the Playstation 5.

Conversely... The compression technology is not a guaranteed compression ratio, some datasets compress better than others, there are going to be times where the SSD isn't going to provide more than 5.5GB/s of bandwidth. It's just impossible.

As for reads vs writes, writes will always be lower than reads, the Playstation 5 will *not* be an exception to this rule due to write amplification, write combining and more that is an inherent limitation of NAND itself.

Basically what happens is the flash needs to be erased before it is re-written, it's two operations instead of one, like a read.

Plus an SSD can only write in 4KB or 8KB chunks inside of a 256KB block...
So if you have 128KB that needs to be written and there is already 128KB of data in the block, the SSD needs to copy all the information in that 256KB block, combine that with the 128KB of new data, erase the 256KB block, then copy all that data back to that 256KB block. It's a much longer and more intricate process...
It gets more complicated if you have lots of 4KB/8KB chunks of data that need to constantly be added to a 256KB block, it can bog down performance considerably.

The SSD cannot simply add that 128KB of data to the already 128KB of data.

It's also why the technology "TRIM" was invented, basically what happens there is the SSD controller scans the SSD for blocks which have been marked as "deleted" but haven't actually been deleted yet, then the SSD will do an erase operation, usually the TRIM command is initiated when the SSD is idle and not being used as a way to ensure performance consistency.
It doesn't always work however... But when it does, it means that potentially you need one less erase operation when doing writes.

So yes the Samsung 980 Pro is faster than the Playstation 5 SSD, the PC has compression technology as well, it's just not baked into hardware.

Hopefully this has cleared some things up.