By: wumpus (lost.delete@this.in.a.cave), April 17, 2019 9:08 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Andrew Clough (someone.delete@this.somewhere.com) on April 17, 2019 5:33 am wrote:
> Anon (no.delete@this.thanks.com) on April 17, 2019 1:18 am wrote:
> > sleep (sleep.delete@this.sogetthis.com) on April 16, 2019 11:04 pm wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > They needed to move beyond spinning rust at some point. Game assets are getting bigger
> > and bigger, and the throughput from a HDD just can't load them into memory fast enough.
> > Not much point running at 25% higher framerate if it takes 5 minutes just to load the game-
> > nobody wants to go back to the old days of loading ZX Spectrum games from cassette.
>
> I wonder if it would make sense to have both a HDD and an SSD acting as a cache for it. Either a block level
> cache a la bcache or just start moving all of a games assets into the SDD when you start playing the game.
One of the few obvious uses for a hybrid drive (well, until the price of flash crashed) was in a PS4pro (no idea if it works in PS4 non-pros). Simply replace the old 5400rpm drive with a new internally cached 7200rpm job. It still likely makes sense, but I suspect that most people willing to rip out a hard drive and replace it will pay twice as much for a pure SSD solution, especially considering that you can't use any drive larger than 2TB.
A bigger question is whether Sony wants to increase the storage limit. Assuming they didn't hard code anything that will interfere with PS4 backward compatibility(a big if), I'd assume that eventually they will want a larger storage space for 4k-8k games vs the full-HD games that the PS4 was designed around. And once you start wanting more space, cache plus rotating rust become an obvious solution.
> Anon (no.delete@this.thanks.com) on April 17, 2019 1:18 am wrote:
> > sleep (sleep.delete@this.sogetthis.com) on April 16, 2019 11:04 pm wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > They needed to move beyond spinning rust at some point. Game assets are getting bigger
> > and bigger, and the throughput from a HDD just can't load them into memory fast enough.
> > Not much point running at 25% higher framerate if it takes 5 minutes just to load the game-
> > nobody wants to go back to the old days of loading ZX Spectrum games from cassette.
>
> I wonder if it would make sense to have both a HDD and an SSD acting as a cache for it. Either a block level
> cache a la bcache or just start moving all of a games assets into the SDD when you start playing the game.
One of the few obvious uses for a hybrid drive (well, until the price of flash crashed) was in a PS4pro (no idea if it works in PS4 non-pros). Simply replace the old 5400rpm drive with a new internally cached 7200rpm job. It still likely makes sense, but I suspect that most people willing to rip out a hard drive and replace it will pay twice as much for a pure SSD solution, especially considering that you can't use any drive larger than 2TB.
A bigger question is whether Sony wants to increase the storage limit. Assuming they didn't hard code anything that will interfere with PS4 backward compatibility(a big if), I'd assume that eventually they will want a larger storage space for 4k-8k games vs the full-HD games that the PS4 was designed around. And once you start wanting more space, cache plus rotating rust become an obvious solution.