I am aware that I focused on interfaces... I said that in the thread. I did it that way because the intrfaces I described are the most common or likely things we would find in the new consoles. And they are what will determine what kinda storage solution we will use. Which brings us back to storage.

I am also aware of SATA express or SATA3.2, but you and I both know thats not going to end up being in the new consoles. There are very few consumer devices that even uses it today and they have been around for a good while now.

Thanks for your input though, and that is what this thread is for. 

Thatrs also a possibility...... as i said earlier in this thread a 480GB M.2 variant SSD is currentlt around $120 or so at retail. For OEMs it could be around $40 by 2020.

my guess we are gonna stick to SATA 3 as we use now (don't know where your 500MB/s came from? since that is not a theoretical max on any of the SATA standards) but move over to disks (SSD) that actually can cap the interface. since you gain nothing form just expanding max bandwidth if the hardware (in this case, harddrive) can't push data fast enough to cap it.

what we are doing now in consoles is sticking a 60-80MB/s mechanical harddrive on a 600MB/s bus.. it is slower than it could be even if we just stick to todays tech.

Answer: SSD's on SATA interface. good price/performance compromise

We all know that SATA 3 has a max theoretical bandwith of 600MB/s. I used 500MB/s cause in reality no one is going to be hitting that theoretical max on average. Even that 500MB/s isn't achieveable in real everyday use unless you are running some sort of test thing.

One thing for certain is that we can't stick to the what we are currently using now. Especially if next gen we have up to 20-32GB of Ram in consoles.

SSDs over sata 3 may seem reasonable, but thats still talking about a peak of about 550MB/s. And thats assuming that peak is hit often. But if they are goiing with SSDs, then they very well could use an M.2 interface. It gives room fro growth. The consoles won't have to ship with the NvME variant of those drives, but with the sata variant, which are significantly cheaper. Then the users could always upgrade their drives if they want better performance to the NvME variant.

What's holding current consoles back from making more use out of SSDs?

I wonder why the gains are generally pretty small compared to HDD. The 5400 rpm drive in the consoles probably don't do more than 80 MB/s. an SSD should be at least 3 times faster even on Sata 2. Load times are faster, yet not that much faster.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-ps4-pro-ssd-upgrade-does-sata-3-make-a-difference
Some games do load almost twice as fast though, others hardly benefit.

If HDDs are still the cheaper option I hope there will be 2 SKUs at launch. SSD option next to HDD. Although that might be confusing to the average consumer, 500GB SSD for 499, 2TB HDD for 399 at launch.

Pinnacle Ridge is likely to be more than just a simple speed bump... It might involve a respin as it may be targeting 12nm, which will bring with it errata fixes, clock rate increases and lower power consumption.

That is "Zen+.". Aka. Ryzen 2.

Ryzen 3 will drop the year after in 2019.
Ryzen 4 in 2020.
Note: That the chips name doesn't necessarily have to correspond with a new core architecture.

If there is a delay or a blow out, my statement still stands as we will be "looking at Ryzen 3/4" and not necessarily "have" Ryzen 3/4.
AMD will be iterating on a yearly cadence going forwards.

Except it doesn't.

Because Sata can be used for SSD's and Mechanical Hard Drives, regardless if it is Sata 1 or Sata 3.2.

If it has M.2 they might just use it as a cache drive.

I don't have issue of what uses what today. I just have issue with your original claim, that Sata is "up-to 500MB/s" when that is blatantly false.
Here is a heap of Ryzen boards supporting Sata Express.
https://www.gigabyte.com/mb/am4/Model

I think going forward tech will be ditching propriety standards and instead have everything dangling off PCI-E lanes in the end.

The SATA speed is almost irrellevent if they still use mechanical disks though, which is the likely outcome due to pricing.

Not all games load things the same way.
Some games will opt for an extremely large chunky load. Some would prefer to do a smaller load and stream in assets over time.
Some games will take a mixed approach.

Some games use an abundance of compression on it's assets which actually loads into RAM quickly, but takes longer to decompress thanks to the CPU.

Which is why there is such large discrepencies in performance in regards to SSD vs mechanical load times on consoles.

All up to the developer essentially.

Yes thats because on the PS4 the I/O bus is basically a SATA 2 lane. That means that anything you conect to that bus will be sharing that 600MB/s max limit. 

Ideally, that bus should have been a PCIE bus which would have meant that all connected devices have a pool of 4GB/s (depending on what kinda PCIE lane is used) to share from. But those PCIE lanes makes the MB cost more to make.

If sales dictate that a new generation is needed to revitalize sales, we will get a new generation no matter the technology. PS4 might do well enough until 2020, but 2022 just sounds unreasonable - especially for a console whose processing power was criticized even when it was released.

Nope, AMD specifically stated that Pinnacle Ridge is NOT Ryzen 2. It will probably have a respin and "12nm process" (which is just an improved 14nm process, really) and certainly have errata fixes and a clock rate increase.

However, I doubt there will be much, if any, change in the power consumption (might be a bit due to the bugfixing and metal spin and the improved process, but don't expect anything more than a couple % out of that) and apart from bugfixing it's still fundamentally a first gen Ryzen, hence why AMD doesn't call it Ryzen 2. At best, it's a minimal shrink from the original Ryzen without any other real improvements. It's a Zen Refresh, but no Zen+ or Zen 2

I don't see anything but Sata 3 + Mechanical HDD happening for the next gen. As prices of Nand and Dram continue to increase due to phones as well as many other things requiring them, I don't see Sony or MS implementing an SSD regardless of their advantages. Specially considering phones are just going up in storage space and ram every year.

Consoles have a limited budget that Sony and MS have to work with and they will most likely focus as much as possible with cpu/gpu power rather than storage interfaces/type. If they can get away with putting a 2TB mechanical hard drive since it will be cheaper than putting an ssd with similar or less amount of storage, they will.