Out of everything Sony has showed so far, this thing seems to stick out like a sore thumb. Only a 6x BD-ROM! Why would they use that when 10 - 12x are already available, and at similar prices?  A 6x drive only has a read speed of 27MB per second, that is 38 secounds just to load 1GB of data, at 12x things are better 54MB/s cutting things to 19 seconds for 1GB. My concern is, if we are going to have 4 - 6GB available for games won't load times be excruciatingly long?

Is this going to create another PS3 situation were devs require HDD installs due to the slow drive speed? Even in that case doesn't a 6x drive just mean longer install times? To me this just looks like bad news. I know that streaming speeds make a world of difference in games, SSD>HDD>BRD, and I want the best experiance they can give us. 

Is this a concern to anyone else?

Optical Drive

(read only)

BD 6xCAV

DVD 8xCAV

*Specifications are subject to change without notice.

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/130221a_e.pdf

Change title to PS4. I guess a faster reader would make sense,

Well I'd assume installs are the approach, but maybe that secondary CPU and ability to play while things are downloading will work even with physical disks. It should be far and wide better. Sony will put a drive fast enough to run 4K blu ray movies. Anyone know what kind of disks speeds that would require? Sony could always change the drive before launch.

I wonder if Sony will put in a hybrid SSD/HDD in? It would have to go through testing for reliability and speed but that can be done. Hybrids are far more affordable now and it would offer SSD speeds with HDD storage.

With background installs/downloads and 8GB of RAM, I don't see this being a huge issue.

The higher speed the drive is, the more expensive it is, simple as that. Most games stream data in as you play, and the core of a games program is quite small, compared to the textures/sound/maps. So they will start plenty fast, and remember there's that new sleep mode for the PS4, turn it off and it saves state, turn it on and your back in the game in seconds without reloading!

Just a few minor obstacles: There are no drives that can play 4k movies. There are no blu-ray disks that can hold a 4k movie. There aren't any specs about how 4k movies actually should be played.

8 Gb.

3x what the PS3 had at least. I was worried aswell when i heard that but then they went on to talk about all the stuff that takes place in the background on the system. Those background operations will be the key reason why the system is much less of a hassle to deal with than the PS3.

I'm really excited about the idea of playing a game a few seconds after I hit the download button.

I believe system RAM and even HDD cache can be used to significantly reduce load times. I think ND used HDD as Cache without an install.

It would be nice if they could incorperate a small amount of SSD to give devs higher streaming access, but it is probably still to expensive. It will come down over time though, and they could even improve the way it is used on future models. I think this would be the unltimate addition in future proofing the console. 

If they gave 2 - 4GB of super fast storage  to start, and had devs move the data from the HDD to the SSD at the start of each play session they could probably make this happen. Then like I said later models could start to ship with 8 or 16GB, and allow you to store game data for games you play more often in the SSD permenatly. With this devs could make sure the most bandwidth heavy streaming data could move through the SSD portion while lesser things can stream from the HDD side and the BD-ROM.

Dgc1808

3x what the PS3 had at least. I was worried aswell when i heard that but then they went on to talk about all the stuff that takes place in the background on the system. Those background operations will be the key reason why the system is much less of a hassle to deal with than the PS3. 

I'm really excited about the idea of playing a game a few seconds after I hit the download button.

I hope that is the case. Having a game stream properly makes a world of differnce in play quality. I had the stock HDD in one of my PS3 when Rage came out and the streaming was atrocious. After dropping and SSD in the system it was a whole different experiance. Hopefully that background functionality will make the above SSD scenario possible.

P.S.

I really hope they stick with the standard HDD, because I want to drop a 512GB SSD in mine from day one.