General external expansion discussion? *spawn*

200$ for 1TB is very expensive. Hopefully price will come down but I do wonder how much they would cost if MS had gone the OTS route. With only 512GB XSS users are going to run out of space soon, 800-1TB will hold a little bit longer but expandable storage is going to come into the value equation of each console.

 

Xbox Series users should be able to juggle the games onto normal usb3 external drives, with the limitations that only original xbox, x360, and xbox one games will be playable from there. That is a more economical solution until the external nvme cards drop in price.

 

Seems like a pretty huge limitation. Again, it will be interesting to see the evolution in price of MS custom SSDs vs OTS components compatible with PS5.

 

I think PS5 has similar, where only prior generation games are playable from external usb3 devices, its just that it only plays PS4 games and not earlier?

And yes, it'll be interesting to see how prices track over time. I ws they'd have at least a second partner with the external expansion cards. Never understood why Seagate's xbox branded usb3 externals for Xbox One were so much more than their normal model externals. I mean other than obviously charging more because more nontechnical consumers willing to pay more.

 

Not saying otherwise. I mean that most people are going to want to play next-gen games and those are going to require SSD storage. I do not think most people are going to care that you can have Infamous Second Son on your 1TB HDD, but if you can install the latest COD without having to delete 2 games in the process.

 

I agree.

I have long since run out of space even on my current-gen 1TB internal consoles, even with my external 6 TB of storage. I had to start deleting games off from them.

But a good number of coworkers are still fine with their 500 gig consoles. They really don't seem to play multiple games at once? I don't see how most of them can do that, even the ones where its their kids that play. I guess some only ever play Destiny or their kids play Fortnite or whatever big MMO-like game they're into?

 

We'll see how big game assets get, if COD Warzone install sizes become the norm then there is going to be an "issue"* for lots of people. We also have to take into account that we won't have 512/825GB/1TB available, but less than that because of the storage allocated to the OS.


*1st world problems.

 

I don't think there are any USB 4.0 chipsets to put in Series X.

I'm pretty certain the external connectors do not come close the the bandwidth and latency of the NVMe connector so I fully expect the external drive to be limited to hitting previous game games on both systems. I do hope there are simple options for copying/moving games though.

 

Am I the only one who cannot quite buy the price everyone is considering? Certainly there is a less than consumer friendly history here. But we are still talking about an SSD that is described as "Budget" by Phison itself. Sans DRAM. Essentially PCIE 3.0 (2 lane) speeds over a PCIE 4.0 connection. 28nm. $220 puts it awfully close to the retail price of an S in and of itself. That just seems calculated to piss people off. I couldn't find a master list of retail SSD's using the PS5019-E19T (may not exist just yet), but just going by other similar drives you are only talking about ~$100. And that is retail, not cost. Is the form factor and the custom line that much of an expense? Going to justify that kind of price with "Making up losses on the sale of the console in peripherals?" Practically speaking, it won't make any difference to me certainly. Practically speaking, this may not really directly effect many people. Still would annoy the hell out of those who might otherwise have considered it at a more consumer friendly price. That price just seems to go against the choice of that SSD in the first place.

edit: Note - Not saying this is impossible. It does seem odd that a placeholder price would be listed with that kind of number rather than say 199.99 or something akin. Just have trouble quite seeing it. Even remembering what I paid for a larger external hdd for my 360 all those years ago.

 

Nope. It should be cheaper for the reasons you're stating and the cost + suitability of QLC nand.

 

If 850 GB is enough for PS5, then 512 GB is enough for XSS. Let's just say that devs better reduce game sizes along with those reduced render targets for XSS, and I think they will. Remember that XSS games won't have the duplicated assets that games like COD have due to HDD limitations. I believe XSS games can be 33% smaller than their PS5 equivalents, and that's all that's required really.

 

820GB isn't enough for PS5. Like XSS's 500GB, it'll do.

 

Yes, because we as consumers have no other choice. It's not like these are customizable SKUs being ordered from Dell or Apple where we have options on internal drive sizes.

 

Yup, The last few generations of console have provided options for expansion. From the PS2 Network adaptor, Sony have let you slot in any size-compatible drive and run with it. That didn't always work out great as we found with Insomniac having to low-ball I/O bandwidth rates of 20mb/sec to accommodate some really crappy drives, which is 40% of the stock drive (50mb/sec) so I think this works fine.

The inbuilt drives on all consoles won't be large enough for a lot of people, but they all have internal expansion options and they all let you plug in something cheap, cheerful and massive to use as mass storage - and let you move games back and forth - it's good.

 

If Sony though 825GB were enough they wouldn't had dedicated a segment talking about SSD expandability during the Road to PS5 presentation.

 

Yup. This is the first time I can recall consoles taking a step back in some metric. This time it is included storage space. There are incredibly good reasons for it, but there we are.

 

What GameStop site is that?

 

IMHO the system needs some kind of auto-caching system anyway to make this a smooth operation.

 

Hopefully, that helps anybody who had any concerns.

Tommy McClain