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Soundwave on 12 May 2025
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Conina said:
Soundwave said:

The gap between SSD and disc read speed is 1000x+ now (5500MB/sec vs 50MB/sec) though, in the past the gap was at least respectable to the point where it made some sense to run a game off a disc ... the disc drive today is basically useless, it's just there to essentially dump the game onto the SSD

Why is 50 MB/s from disc "basicly useless"? The internet speed average of most countries every country is slower than that: 

f.e. USA = 287 MBit/s = 36 MB/s, Canada = 242 MBit/s = 30 MB/s, France = 300 MBit/s = 38 MB/s, Japan = 220 MBit/s = 28 MB/s, Germany = 99 MBit/s = 12 MB/s

Or do you buy SSDs where the console games are already preinstalled?

I'm saying for running an actual game, a disc drive in this day and age is essentially useless. 

Why would you want to run a game with 50MB/sec data transfer when the SSD runs at 1000x (!) the speed. At bare minimum it would render loading times entirely moot. 

So the days of the disc drive being used for actually running games are basically over. All they are now is basically a glorified way to dump data onto the SSD. Even compared to the UFS 3.1 storage in the Switch 2 and a lot of Android phones, that has speeds of about 1200MB/sec ... that absolutely demolishes a disc drive. 

For digital downloads you can also have pre-loading where the game is already loaded onto your system and ready to play right at midnight or whatever of release date, so even the utility of the disc being there so you don't have to wait to download a game is kinda murky these days.