220 for the Xbox 1TB expansion SSD. So in-line right now pricewise. It will be interesting to see which drive gets below 200 or so first. Competition would say Sony but MS has a lot of money to be able to lose as well.
General external expansion discussion? *spawn*
- Thread starter goonergaz
- Start date
Do we know the spec of PS5?
For some reason I got the impression from somewhere it was higher.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
AFAICR AMD Zen 2 doesn't natively support USB 3.2 gen 2x2, it goes up to USB 3.2 gen 2.
Of course, nothing stops Sony from including USB 3.2 gen 2x2 via an external chip connected by PCIE, but that does add additional cost. While the USB 3.2 gen 2x2 standard was finalized in 2017, wide availability of USB gen 2x2 chips weren't widely available until late 2018/early 2019. This would put it pretty late in the console development cycle. I'm not sure you'd be wanting to add something that might introduce further complications into getting the console to market that late in the development cycle.
Regards,
SB
Unknown Soldier
Veteran
Yep and worse for MS is that in a years time, prices might fall to $200 or $180 for the 1TB. For Sony, the variety of manufacteres could have prices as low as $100-120 for a 1TB and $200-250 for a 2TB especially come Black Friday at the end of the year.
Unknown Soldier
Veteran
Sony also said that they would have a whitelist of drives that people can purchase for the PS5. So @eastmen is incorrect in thinking that he can just plug any old drive into the PS5 because as you mentioned it won't work.
I guess that whitelist should be listed on Nov 12.
It's not as simple as just plopping a high speed name drive into anything. The drive must maintain it's 2.4GB/s throughput in all conditions, heat etc. There is no down throttling of speed. This is the biggest issue with consumer name drives, its ability to maintain high performance for long periods of time.
I would not bank on 'cheap' readily available nvme drives that can hold 5.5 gb/s sustained for PS5. If Sony hasn't announced any partners that are capable of being an expansion drive for PS5 yet, there should be a reason, equally there is a reason why MS went this route instead of the Sony route. It's unlikely that MS wouldn't have caught such a severe downward swing in nvme price/performance. I suspect most of these cheaper drives may not have the type of endurance needed at the performance levels required. To put things into perspective UE5 tech demo had a streaming pool limit of 768MB. That means a great deal of pressure is being placed on the SSD to feed information into memory.
It would be a complete blunder on MS here if cheaper consumer drives were perfectly capable of long term sustained speeds over the course of a generation.
I would not bank on 'cheap' readily available nvme drives that can hold 5.5 gb/s sustained for PS5. If Sony hasn't announced any partners that are capable of being an expansion drive for PS5 yet, there should be a reason, equally there is a reason why MS went this route instead of the Sony route. It's unlikely that MS wouldn't have caught such a severe downward swing in nvme price/performance. I suspect most of these cheaper drives may not have the type of endurance needed at the performance levels required. To put things into perspective UE5 tech demo had a streaming pool limit of 768MB. That means a great deal of pressure is being placed on the SSD to feed information into memory.
It would be a complete blunder on MS here if cheaper consumer drives were perfectly capable of long term sustained speeds over the course of a generation.
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Yes, ker-ching
Unknown Soldier
Veteran
I would assume you couldn't fit that into the PS5 as Cerny said SSD's with heatsinks wouldn't fit.
I agree it’s very easy to judge how poor MS solution is compared to their competitor who has announced nothing.
We don’t know when that white list is coming, and we don’t know what type of drive or format that PS5 needs.
We’ve not seen a tear down, so there really is no basis in which people are judging their solution except to place hopes that there will be super high performance at super low price.
Not really, you're using outliners to defend MS.
MS are overcharging for a proprietary device - nothing new here, simply to make money. They have complete control over the cost which (history proves) won't be consumer friendly.
Sony are saying standard SSDs that fit the criteria will be compatible, they have no control over the costs but common sense dictates it'll be cheaper and offer substantially more options.
Oh in not saying MS isn’t profiting from a proprietary Ssd. Certainly there is some form of margin there. But some you are making it seem like it’s 2x to 3X the cost. I’m not so sure at all that a free market will necessarily be that much cheaper at all.
I’ll wait for final details before declaring Sony’s solution superior.
Right now I guess there's no competitive advantage to price below the kind of drives PS5 is likely to need. I think the Samsung 980 Pro might be one of the first candidates, and it's not cheap:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16087/the-samsung-980-pro-pcie-4-ssd-review
I'm disappointed in the price of the Xbox expansion drive, and had thought a desire to drive game sales and Gamepass uptake might lead MS to price it lower than they have. But I guess they'll be monitoring everything going on with the XSX | S platforms and can adjust if they feel they need to.
I'm assuming that MS are using QLC and not the more expensive TLC here btw. If it turned out they were using TLC then the price would be more understandable.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16087/the-samsung-980-pro-pcie-4-ssd-review
I'm disappointed in the price of the Xbox expansion drive, and had thought a desire to drive game sales and Gamepass uptake might lead MS to price it lower than they have. But I guess they'll be monitoring everything going on with the XSX | S platforms and can adjust if they feel they need to.
I'm assuming that MS are using QLC and not the more expensive TLC here btw. If it turned out they were using TLC then the price would be more understandable.
We know that a much superior SSD is around the same price, so it goes without saying MS are making a profit now and will keep the price high as they have always done (see the X360 HDD add-on).
We know the PS5 compatible SSDs will be cheaper as time goes on because they are not proprietary and as such there is no desire to keep prices artificially higher due to competition. There is also the 2nd hand market where the PC market are constantly upgrading and therefore more availability and options open to PS5 owners. Unless for some unknown reason Sony only 'green light' some drives...but then you will always have people upgrading and testing drives themselves.
Rurouni
Veteran
I think one of the thing that makes Xbox expansion look worse is the existence of XsS. You look at the price of XsS then you look at the price of the expansion... it isn't pretty, especially in Europe. Maybe if they also released 512GB expansion at the same time, the price comparison would look more sane.
As for the PS5 storage, well, if Samsung priced their SSD at 230, then the possibility of other brand to have something at a lower price is very high. It still won't be cheap especially since that speed tier is still new, but it is probably going to drop in price quicker than Xbox expansion. Also remember that it has almost 3 times the read speed compared to Xbox expansion. And if you buy it now and in the future you want to upgrade to 2TB, you can still use your old NVMe drive for something else! Maybe for PS5 external storage with an enclosure or just put it in a PC/laptop.
And it's fast.
As for the PS5 storage, well, if Samsung priced their SSD at 230, then the possibility of other brand to have something at a lower price is very high. It still won't be cheap especially since that speed tier is still new, but it is probably going to drop in price quicker than Xbox expansion. Also remember that it has almost 3 times the read speed compared to Xbox expansion. And if you buy it now and in the future you want to upgrade to 2TB, you can still use your old NVMe drive for something else! Maybe for PS5 external storage with an enclosure or just put it in a PC/laptop.
And it's fast.
And we don’t know which ones are compatible. You can’t just look at 1 number and in this case marketed drive speed, and assume that meets all their other requirements. No one knows what the specs are for the Xbox drive except for 2.4Gb/s guaranteed. That’s all. We know little about anything else. Basing the entire argument around one metric is not sufficient in understanding the decisions made for hardware selection. There are all sorts of different requirements. There is random reads, random writes, the number of writes etc.
Xbox hot swapping 6 or so titles, they are dumping that memory somewhere. That’s a full 16Gb of memory dump every time you swap off to another title. Hot swapping several times a day and it’s equivalent to writing 100GB per day.
don’t be in such a hurry to judge, the price sucks for sure, but we have no real comparison here. We’ve not seen any UI or OS features, we don’t know what Ps5 needs or what Series S-X actually need to run, we only know their drive speed.
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D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
I've not seen this, can you provide a link?
Sony, specifically Mark Cerny said: PS5 supports standard NVMe drives. Don't buy any old NVMe drive for PS5. We'll let you know later which drives are compatible.
So not nothing.
That's far from somethingSony, specifically Mark Cerny said: PS5 supports standard NVMe drives. Don't buy any old NVMe drive for PS5. We'll let you know later which drives are compatible.
So not nothing.
Don't buy PCIE 3 drives. Okay. But there's a huge spectrum of drives out there with different performance characteristics. I don't want to just put in any drive in there just because it's cheap and have it die later so I have to rebuy it again.
He also said "As for the details of the cooling solution, we're saving them for our teardown, I think you'll be quite happy with what the engineering team came up with."
Which most took to mean or hoped to mean happening soon. What fools we were to hope for it to happen sooner. I think the NVME drive compatibility list will happen before that teardown.
Which most took to mean or hoped to mean happening soon. What fools we were to hope for it to happen sooner. I think the NVME drive compatibility list will happen before that teardown.
DigitalFoundry said:
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
Clearly Lord of the Rings did not teach you that hope is folly. If Sony had failed to meet a commitment, I'd understand complaints but because Sony didn't like up to your hopes? Come on BRiT, say it loud. That's nuts!
It taught me that fools walk when you can fly.
