Actually S2 carts are being reported at 220 mb/s.  While with SD express speeds max at 900 mb/s.  The ps4 internal is 88 mb/s, close to carts.  The ps4 supports external drives up to 600 mb/s, close to SD express.

On the slip side the ps5 is at 5,500 mb/s, well beyond carts and SD express.  

Factually, the S2 sits closer to the ps4 in read/write speeds than the ps5.  

Not too mention drive speeds help primarily with loading and occasionally with ultra quality texture loading.  Given the S2 has a max memory bandwidth of 102 gb/s, it isnt going to use ultra high textures, thus not going to significantly impact gaming.

So, swing and a miss.  

One could easily build a HDD based computer and be perfectly fine with 99% of games.  Heck, DF, got Rift Apart working with a standard hdd.  Only thing fast drives do is reduce loading and data transfers.  Impact to actual gaming is extremely minimal.

Feel free to check out Steam where Rift recommends SSD, but isn't required.  And Rift is one of the few games where drive speed would have an impact.

Gaming is largely bottlenecked by gpu, the other aspects have way smaller impacts.  

Full bs. Also its good that you understand that pc players are by far worst gaming community. And you fully deserve that terrible reputation. Sony moving away from pc is very moral thing.

lol, k.  Great argument, love the structure and factual delivery.  Well thought.  

Majority of developers saying that ssd is super important thing. Tell this bs to developers of Star wars outlaws for example or Assasins creed shadows.

ps4 supports SSD, both internal and external.  

The thing is though that because the system doesn't have one by default, the games cannot be built around taking advantage of it because every PS4 game needs to be able to work from a stock slow HDD.

PS4 also doesn't have the modern accelerated hardware decompression that Switch 2 has.

Agreed.  But the argument put forth is the ps4 can't do modern games because SSD..  not true.  The ps4 supports SSD and factually can supporr and required games.  

If a game needs an SSD though, then in practise you won't be able to release it on PS4 as is because it wouldn't work on the majority of PS4s which aren't SSD equipped.

No different than Nintendo releasing 3ds exclusives requiring the new pro models, like xeno.  It cut out a lot of existing owners but they did it.  Sony absolutely could release games that require a ssd.

The ps4 factually supports ssd.  That isnt an opinion.

An SSD alone doesn't necessarily bridge the gap though; you can stream data from storage more quickly, but much of that data still needs to be decompressed and the PS4 will be bottlenecked there because it lacks the modern fast decompression hardware that systems like the PS5 and Switch 2 have.