sleep (sleep.delete@this.sogetthis.com) on April 16, 2019 11:04 pm wrote:
> https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console/
>
> PR blitz from Sony. Confirms Navi, Zen 2 and an SSD that "has
> a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs".
>
> I'm surprised at how hard they are selling faster storage. Are they actually planning on putting
> a fast, high-capacity SSD in every console? Wouldn't that money be better spent on GPU power or
> more/faster memory? Maybe someone who actually knows anything about games could chime in.

I don't think you need to know much about games to figure out the reason.

Fastest mainstream 7200 RPM hard disks nowadays give you around 150 MB/s. PS5 will likely have 12GB+ of RAM. So that's 80 seconds to load game assets. This is truly 8-bit age loading time. Replace with SSD on SATA - faster, but still way too slow. Consider that down the road say in 3 years (or even sooner) gaming experience will be compared to a new PC with a fast NVMe SSD. If you want to sell the "ultimate" gaming device for a long time you want to be prepared for that.

So it makes perfect sense to include 256-512 GB of really fast SSD storage using the fastest available interface, and even for secondary storage extension option it is more future proof to have NVMe instead of SATA.