News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

The external usb hdd you can use with X1, you can run games from it, that is what we are talking about?
Does format the drive so you can not use it for anything else? Or could it be also connected to the PC which has its own partition etc?

 

I have a 7.1 system and still need the lower quality stuff for when I'm just using the TV, like late at night or very early in the morning. The reverse is rarely true. Rather than have the user select audio packs and 2D/3D movie preferences, the console could just do this depending on how it's setup. If the user has set it up to work with just a 2D TV, there is no point downloading 3D movies and so on.

Right, but my point remains. Developers can't expect all drives connected to the Xbox One to perform like the internal drive, because they don't - despite the drive you have, connected to your PC, performing well.

 

I wonder what they tell the devs about guaranteed performance for streaming assets in-game, how would they test a "worst-case" installation when doing the Q/A ?

They should probably put a disclaimer to gamers, like if you put something that is slower than the stock internal drive, you're on your own and it's unsupported.

 

Testing is easy, they just have an option to cap the transfer rate in the software on test units.
Any external drive won't have to deal with sharing bandwidth, with OS services, though they might be using the flash for that.
They can also do a speed test as part of the installation/format process, but my expectation would be you'd have to work pretty hard to find a drive below the guaranteed minimum. It turns out that when you buy HDD's in bulk for a device, there are a very small number that pass, but have considerably worse performance than the average HDD in the batch, your minimum guarantee has to take these into account.

 

Actually they can IF Microsoft does the exact same sort of speed-check that they currently do on the Xbox360 USB drives. I see no reason for MS to not have the same minimum speed checks for the Xbox One and external drives.

 

Aren't all samples in mono?

 

One-time random key generation would make external storage slightly more secure than the internal one in the sense that one needs to crack internal storage first to decrypt external data.

 

To some extent it might even be worse, considering that there isn't a 360 platform limited by DVD to set the bar.

 

I don't see it as any less secure than the internal drive, anyone can remove the internal drive and read it. The crypto certainly happens before data ever goes through either an USB3 or a SATA channel.

Maybe it's an issue with disk format, there's also the UI complexity, they have to ask where to install the games every time, then provide facilities to copy/move them, scan all drives to see where games are, allow the drive to be disconnected, choose where to install the games when on standby. They could always add this later, but there would need to be at least some gamers who want it.

 

I think they are simply going with a OS that is alot like the PS3 OS and they don't have or had any intention to support external drives, it might require a whole lot of effort to make it work. Plus they might consider it an "attack" vector to have something you can play games from on the USB3 port. It's not like they have a good track record with USB

 

From Engadget:

On Xbox 360 I can install games on USB pendrives, and it uses Fat32.

You can use more than 1 partition, but the first must be Fat32.

 

Not really.

Take a look here, for example. I have to use 2 links to illustrate the point because Techreport used to list CPU performance of all peripherals but over time they dropped the CPU utilization for SATA ports and then USB as well due to the numbers being so low as to be non-relavent anymore...

Older review showing USB 2.0 and SATA 2.0 as they dropped SATA CPU utilization for SATA 3 capable MBs. This just shows that it's generally the same, except for MSI who had a horrible USB implementation on their MB.

http://techreport.com/review/17598/a-look-at-asus-p7p55d-and-gigabyte-ga-p55-ud4p-motherboards/6

If you match up the MBs tested you'll see that depending on Motherboard maker and their implementation, CPU utilization is basically the same. Sometimes USB 2.0 is lower CPU useage and sometimes SATA 2 is lower CPU useage.

Here's something relatively newer showing USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 CPU utilization on AMD based motherboards.

http://techreport.com/review/21019/bulldozer-mobos-from-asus-and-msi-sabertooth-990fx-990fxa-gd80/8

Basically still the same as native SATA CPU utilization. And again, certain MB implementations are pretty bad.

With modern CPUs, APUs, and SOCs moving USB and SATA controllers onto the CPU/APU/SOC dies, the performance should be universally good. There will basically be little to no difference between native SATA and native USB CPU utilization.

Regards,
SB

 

I'm also a bit confused by the, "But USB 3.0 is far too slow!" claims I'm reading here. Out of curiosity, I googled external USB 3.0 SSD drives earlier today. (I was reading about Flash Caches over in the Console Tech forum, and was wondering if adding an external drive "cache" to a PS4/XB1 was even theoretically possible.) I found these.

They are expensive and comparatively small, but their performance completely smokes the limits that are being bandied about in this thread. (~400MB/s, both read and write.) That seems to indicate that the USB interface is not necessarily the weak link it's being portrayed as. (Although I could certainly believe it's still not as good as an all-SATA pipeline.)

I might go as far as to speculate that a fast 3.5" external USB 3.0 drive might outperform any 2.5" internal spinny drive that could fit inside the consoles we are discussing, and would cost you less as well. You are paying extra, and giving up performance, when you switch to that laptop form-factor. Of course an SSD would be faster still, and they fit more-or-less everywhere.

In short, IMO, having the option of connecting an external drive is a Good Thing(tm), even if you, personally, don't plan on doing that.

 

I'm also confused by all of the complaining about the inability to install games to an external drive (yes the PS4 still supports external drives for storage).

I personally like the option of putting an internal SSD or larger HDD with the option of using external storage for media purposes IF need be.

 

It's only appreciably slower if you have an SSD drive that can max out SATA 3. That's where the data transfer limits come into play (6 Gb/s versus 5 Gb/s). Otherwise there isn't an appreciable difference in performance as long as the USB 3 and SATA 3 controllers are designed well. Early non-Intel SATA 3 controllers (Jmicron especially) were sometimes slower than Intel SATA 2 controllers. The same went for early USB 3 controllers.

For any given price point you should be able to get a larger and/or faster 3.5" external drive than an internal 2.5" drive.

It's a personal preference thing. In an ideal world you would be able to both expand upon internal storage as well as install to external storage.

I personally abhor waste and given the choice I would rather extend my storage rather than replace my storage.

I also respect people's preference for replacing the internal storage even if you can't install to external storage. it's interesting that people question why I would want to install games to external storage. I've never questioned why people wouldn't want to install games to external storage.

In many ways it's similar to how I haven't installed a game to my C: drive on my PC since 1998 but I still know plenty of people that do.

Regards,
SB