corduroygt
Banned
What's stopping Sony from releasing a PS3 32GB SSD when the SSD becomes cheaper than a traditional HDD? Most SSD's already come in 2.5" form factor anyway.
How can Sony further cost reduce the entry-level PS3? *spawn
- Thread starter corduroygt
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Marketing
With all the games with Mandatory Installation ranging from a couple of Mb to a couple of Gb, a 32Gb SSD would never do. The rewrite rate would be huge after playing a couple of games.
Given a 10,000 write cycle lifetime, a 32GB SSD would sustain 30MB/s of non-stop writing for 123 days. So it could easily be done.
There economics aren't there though, IMO.
Cheers
where did you get the 10,000 write cycle on ssd's from?
aaronspink
Veteran
10k+ cycles is the base erase lifetime of raw MLC flash. Once you factor in wear leveling, you get another order of magnitude or more out of it. SLC flash generally has a baseline of 100k+ cycles.
Most quality flash devices exceed these levels of erase cycles though.
Memory.
Googling around, Tech report says 10,000 for Intel's MLC SSDs. Other sources says from 10,000 up to 2,000,000. The latter being completely bogus. I'm comfortable with using 10,000 as a lower bound.
Cheers
from intel -
Drives made with MLC memory, the type of NAND Flash used in the X25-M, traditionally have had two disadvantages: slower performance and shorter life expectancy. However, Intel has redesigned the drive's firmware and controller to offer both better performance and write endurance capable of handling 100GB per day of writes for 5 years. Since, according to Intel, the average user writes only 4 to 5GB per day, the drive should last much longer than the computer in which it's installed.
its not perfect, but on one will hit 100gb a day of writes on a console.
Edit* that was early 2009...things have probably, and will probably continue to improve.
Really?
The only source of frequent writes would if the flash is used for caching BluRay data. This limits the write speed to 9MB/s for a 2x BluRay drive like the one in the PS3. With a 100GB per day limit, that means your PS3 can write BluRay data for 3 hours every day before hitting that limit. Which will never happen, since the point of caching is to reduce the number of BluRay accesses.
Cheers
sure enough, however,
you wouldnt be constantly streaming for 3 hours...given a BR disc is 25 - 50gb *max* then by the time youve dumped the whole disc into cache, its no longer writing. and lets be honest here, you not even going to bother caching things like music and video. purely game data, which you would only hit anywhere near a BR's capacity if you played the whole thing through.
The performance decreases over time. And still, with the amount of mandatory installations on PS3, 32 discs would be too small. Going back from 80/120/250Gb to 32Gb would be hard.
More interesting. I saw the wrong price on the 2007 SDD disc. It was more like 500 dollars for 16gb.
So the price has gone from over 30 dollars per Gb in 2007 to around 2,5-4 dollars per Gb in 2007.
Projections in 2006 said around 9 dollars per Gb in 2010, which is way of mark.
With the major finance crisis behind us one can expect that the huge investments made by the increasing numbers of companies in the SSD market (over 150 OEMs today, compared with less than 50 two years ago) will lead to increased fall in prices at huge speed in 2012-2013.
Price below 1 dollar per Gb in 2012 seems possible. With the price of a 2,5” being around 0,2 dollar per Gb (which of course will decrease also) a switch to SSD I the next gen should be more logical.
3,5” disc won’t be an alternative due to space and besides the advantage of price per dollar on 2,5” HDD, SSD is the best choice on all other points.
By taking SSD as a standard in the next gen. If the build the software around SSD from the start, the advantage would be even greater instead of switching later on. Today both PS3 and 360 have NAND chip already, that won’t be necessary with only SSD.
The question is, should the choose a standard 2,5” SSD that can be replaced by the consumer or a integrated SSD. The latter would be better for security and the replacing of NAND + 2,5 HDD solution today.
Tell that to everyone buying the 360 Arcade.
It would be an entry unit, once you go serious in your gaming you can upgrade by adding a hard drive just like the Arcade.
Not really an issue for the game files, you can simply use a filesystem which only writes complete pages (not really a big problem for game developers who tend to use their own filesystems inside big chunked files anyway). The performance decrease is just a special form of fragmentation caused by small writes.
I've a 40GB PS3. Dont think I've ever used up more than half of it. And who would go from 80+ GB to 32GB? If you already have an 80+GB PS3, why buy the cheap entry-level model with SSD?
Don't look at the SSD prices, just look at the USB sticks instead ... that's where the SSD prices are trending to, raw flash cost with minimal margins (which is where cheap USB sticks, say Kingston Datatraveler, have been for a while). By using the SSD price trend you are ignoring the fact that most of the fall has been from margins dropping.
To see where SSD prices are going use USB flash prices and Moore's law (price per GB halving every 18 months).
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
The X360 doesn't have mandatory installs (partial or full) however. So that's a bit of a while elephant.
You cannot run many games on PS3 without a storage device. So a PS3 with insufficient storage space would be a consumer and support nightmare.
Regards,
SB
We were discussing 32 GB of storage in the entry level unit in this case. Also read Shiftys last post above.
The point is that larger hard drives are obviously most needed for other media than game data at this point in time.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Then why even bring up the X360 arcade? I'm looking back at the post you originally replied to and I don't see what bearing a system with no need for installs of any kind have on how much storage space is need in the face of required HD installs.
There will never be a point on the X360 arcade where if you bought every single game available on the console you'll at some point not be able to play one without uninstalling another game.
There will possibly be a point where a 32 gb PS3 would run out of space after X amount of games where you'll start to have to juggle which games to keep installed and which ones not, if you bought and continue to play a lot of games.
Not to mention the fact that a 32 gb PS3 (currently 99 USD for cheapest SSD) will still be more expensive than a 250 gb PS3 (currently 50 USD for cheapest HDD) negating its use as an entry level console.
Regards,
SB
corduroygt
Banned
Considering that Sony had 20 and 40GB PS3's out there without any of these support "nightmares", I think 32 GB SSD would be fine once it cost less than 20 bucks. If you are a serious gamer, you'll buy a bigger hard drive just like xbox pro users who upgraded their 20GB hard drives to 120GB. The SSD option is always there for eliminating the "fixed cost" of traditional hard drives to the bottom line of PS3 BOM, we just have to wait until they are cheap enough and I'm sure Sony will consider it too.
The Arcade is an entry level unit and its storage is upgradeable, the 32 GB unit we were discussing could fit that purpose.
For obvious price reasons there isn´t such a unit on the market today, but the Arcade proves there is a market for such type of upgradeable entry level unit.
For your information there are 360 games requiring mandatory installs or disk swapping (read Forza3 and Rage coming up) so yeah, the Arcade got limits too which some people may find cumbersome. So if you have to uninstall a PS3 game at some point in time people may do that and accept the hassle or they just buy a hard drive, again read Shiftys post (Edit: or corduroygt´s post above).
But hey it will be a cheap entry level unit and being cheap is what an entry level unit is all about.
