anon (spam.delete.delete.delete@this.this.this.spam.com) on April 18, 2019 7:36 am wrote:

> But that's not actually useful. I don't think game developers would be happy if Sony
> told them "You asked for an SSD so we got you an SSD. It doesn't do anything you'd expect
> an SSD to do apart from higher sequential read speeds because we went with the absolute
> cheapest NAND and implementation we could find, but technically it's an SSD".

Devil's advocate: why not?

When installing, you're limited by media or network speeds.

When you're saving, you'd be doing a single write, surely?

Patching is best done when the system is idle.

How many games do a lot of random reads? Right now they won't, because they have to support hard disks. What's the use case for a seriously large database in a game (unless it's used to store blobs?)

The article was talking about getting multi-megabyte textures and data off disk quickly. It's aimed at large sequential reads. It's not at all unusual for consoles to come up with highly-tuned hardware aimed at a very particular idea of how it will be used.