General external expansion discussion? *spawn*

[Deleted member 13524]

I mean, I agree most of the time it will only be reading sure for gameplay usage. But you gotta put the games onto the drive before you can start reading them off.
These games are in the 25-100GB range. You're likely to spend more than 100s loading games onto the drive if you're transferring from your internal.
The more games you swap in and out, the more you need to deal with this.

Downloading titles should be relatively tame though.

You're going to download and/or transfer titles at 5GB/s = 40Gbps?
The console's USB caps at 10Gbps and the Ethernet caps at 1Gbps.

 

[BRiT]

You're going to download and/or transfer titles at 5GB/s = 40Gbps?
The console's USB caps at 10Gbps and the Ethernet caps at 1Gbps.

That's why he said downloading would be tame.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

It'd be interesting to find out why it's so difficult for Sony to enable this functionality. While I doubt this is the case, part of me wonders if maybe in testing, no drive currently on the market can provide sufficient sustained performance and they are waiting for a new wave of drives to come out.

Regards,
SB

 

[Rootax]

It'd be interesting to find out why it's so difficult for Sony to enable this functionality. While I doubt this is the case, part of me wonders if maybe in testing, no drive currently on the market can provide sufficient sustained performance and they are waiting for a new wave of drives to come out.

Regards,
SB

This is what I believe, no drive is enough yet. I guess top speed is fine but other éléments are not meet yet.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

It'd be interesting to find out why it's so difficult for Sony to enable this functionality. While I doubt this is the case, part of me wonders if maybe in testing, no drive currently on the market can provide sufficient sustained performance and they are waiting for a new wave of drives to come out.

This is what Mark Cerny said. Why enable the slot when no drive has been tested fast enough to work? People are already idiots who don't read, they'll be buying cheap-ass M.2 drives off Amazon and NewEgg then complaining when the PS5 rejects them. The drives have to be faster than the internal storage because there are less priority levels so they need performance overhead to accommodate that.

 

[Arwin]

I think that too.

However I am not sure about the sequential read argument. Sure that is the case for older games, but the whole point of this design is for streaming objects from anywhere on the drive as you need them and in parallel with various priority levels etc. Or am I missing something or misunderstanding sequential reads in this context?

I do expect the NVME drive to add to the cooling requirements, and more so as games continue to evolve to make use of these new options and start to push them.

 

[goonergaz]

This is what Mark Cerny said. Why enable the slot when no drive has been tested fast enough to work? People are already idiots who don't read, they'll be buying cheap-ass M.2 drives off Amazon and NewEgg then complaining when the PS5 rejects them. The drives have to be faster than the internal storage because there are less priority levels so they need performance overhead to accommodate that.

IIRC didn’t the 980pro have something about being PS5 compatible? Certainly I recall the hope!

 

[pjbliverpool]

The Western Digital SN850 was originally announced as PS5 compatible but WD later retracted the statement. I'd assume as a major SSD provider that they know the performance characteristics required for compatibility and made the announcement off the back of that but were told by Sony not to jump the gun. The current generation of SSD controllers are already pushing the limits of PCIe 4.0 so unless there's a suggestion that the PS5 won't get any compatible drives until PCIe 5.0 drives release years from now, then I think it's reasonable to assume that there are drives available now in the 7GB/s range that will be fast enough.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

That's why he said downloading would be tame.

Any data transfer will be tame in the writing process. Those temperatures refer to a constant 40Gbps writing and the PS5 has no means to write at even half that speed for 100s.
Not even if you transfer files from the embedded storage to the NVMe, since the controller only handles one storage at a time so on average it can only do 20Gbps (and why would anyone transfer entire games that way?).
The only way to get 40Gbps write would be to dump all the RAM content into the drive, but at those speeds it would take less than 4 seconds which is not nearly enough time to heat the controller over 50-60°C.

It'd be interesting to find out why it's so difficult for Sony to enable this functionality. While I doubt this is the case, part of me wonders if maybe in testing, no drive currently on the market can provide sufficient sustained performance and they are waiting for a new wave of drives to come out.

Regards,
SB

My guess is the people working on it just aren't very competent, and/or Sony isnt dedicating enough resources to it.
Or it could be completely political, e.g. Sony is waiting for a certain brands to have their PCIe 4.0 7GB/s models ready for the announcement, due to cross-marketing deals.

 

[iroboto]

Any data transfer will be tame in the writing process. Those temperatures refer to a constant 40Gbps writing and the PS5 has no means to write at even half that speed for 100s.
Not even if you transfer files from the embedded storage to the NVMe, since the controller only handles one storage at a time so on average it can only do 20Gbps (and why would anyone transfer entire games that way?).
The only way to get 40Gbps write would be to dump all the RAM content into the drive, but at those speeds it would take less than 4 seconds which is not nearly enough time to heat the controller over 50-60°C.

It's on the concept that the hardware is ultimately the restriction of what software is capable of. For instance, while the occurrence is rare that someone would want to transfer their embedded to nvme storage, if Sony allows that function then they must support it properly even if no one really uses it; they can't be in a liable position for instance where during file transfer that they burn a drive out for instance. I don't expect that to happen because you can just throttle drive transfers, but w/e. I think the point is, it's up to Sony to decide what they want the hardware to do.

The other aspect is that we are still unsure as to what the future holds around the usage of these drives and looking 7 years into the future as we leave cross gen, there may be very particular features that developers will need to break boundaries which may exceed VRAM limitations, so writing things back to the drive might be a feature that developers may require. So if you're constantly writing back to the drive Sony needs to determine what drives are capable of that feature.

I don't know what the future holds really, but I think it would be a huge loss if developers were only allowed to read from the drive and not be able to read and write to the drive in real time. The idea of game permanence is compelling and now possible with fast write speeds.

 

[BRiT]

Some relief for PS5 owners with external storage is finally in sight:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1381948953755852803

 

[goonergaz]

FWIW not all XSX games play off external drives.

 

[iroboto]

FWIW not all XSX games play off external drives.

no XSX games play off external drives only XBO generation and below does.

 

[BRiT]

FWIW not all XSX games play off external drives.

I never saw anyone say as much. Xbox One, X360, and OG Xbox games can play off externals. Optimized/Patched for SeriesX|S require internal NVME or official NVME External Storage Card

 

[goonergaz]

no XSX games play off external drives only XBO generation and below does.

I never saw anyone say as much. Xbox One, X360, and OG Xbox games can play off externals. Optimized/Patched for SeriesX|S require internal NVME or official NVME External Storage Card

I wasn’t aware, but then it’s a bit confusing on Xbox side with no ‘true’ exclusives...but it’s probably just me.

 

[BRiT]

I wasn’t aware, but then it’s a bit confusing on Xbox side with no ‘true’ exclusives...but it’s probably just me.

There are some, you're just unaware.

 

[iroboto]

I wasn’t aware, but then it’s a bit confusing on Xbox side with no ‘true’ exclusives...but it’s probably just me.

This is likely because of the seamless type 'smart aware system' they attempt to pull. If a game on your external HDD has Series X|S enhancements, it immediately downloads the enhanced edition to your internal drive (or nvme expansion, whatever you set as default). And from there it always just loads your enchanted version.

So it may have been difficult to tell I guess.

I think the Medium is the only one that is exclusively for next gen platforms. The rest are still coming.

 

[BRiT]

I think the Medium is the only one that is exclusively for next gen platforms. The rest are still coming.

Enlisted is another one not available on last gen consoles.

 

[goonergaz]

This is likely because of the seamless type 'smart aware system' they attempt to pull. If a game on your external HDD has Series X|S enhancements, it immediately downloads the enhanced edition to your internal drive (or nvme expansion, whatever you set as default). And from there it always just loads your enchanted version.

So it may have been difficult to tell I guess.

I think the Medium is the only one that is exclusively for next gen platforms. The rest are still coming.

It was the Outriders game I was having issues with. It wouldn’t let me d/l to external- I have to move stuff around first - a right PITB esp for a game which doesn’t seem to be doing anything special.

 

[iroboto]

It was the Outriders game I was having issues with. It wouldn’t let me d/l to external- I have to move stuff around first - a right PITB esp for a game which doesn’t seem to be doing anything special.

Oh, like you mean just copying it over? I think that works, you just can't run it.