Next-Generation NVMe SSD and I/O Technology [PC, PS5, XBSX|S]

As far as I can remember, Sony has never stated that you needed 7GB/s to match the performance of PS5 SSD. What they have publicly communicated is that you need something slightly faster so their IO subsystem can compensate for the fewer priority levels for IO requests arbitration.

All PS5s come with an SSD built in, why would they need to take into account slower SSDs? Multiplatform devs target a wide range of storage anyway so we are left with just exclusives that may push the SSD. Games should scale how they load and stream data based on how fast your storage can manage anyway.

 

Nice 1TB full storage. I m probably gonna wait for more options and an official lists next year but i m tempted by the Aorus 7000s series or the WD sn850. But not in a rush will wait for more exclusives to be available.
I wish you could put more than one external SSD as well on PS5. But maybe in a revision model in few years.




As for Spiderman Miles Morales :

 

Is this just to test write speeds or something?
As the ssd may be upgradable but I wouldn't call it portable. Your not going to be moving games back and forth from it?

 

huh? what the...
1TB detected as 1TB? isn't they usually around 900 GB?

Does PS5 use 1000 instead of 1024?
so the 825 GB of SSD with ~666 GB usable internal storage is actually even smaller?

although in practicality it doesnt really matter haha.

 

Yes that's true, Sony never said 7GB/s, I think there was just a general assumption from some quarters that you would need something quite significantly faster than the PS5 drive to match the PS5 performance, i.e. something in the 6-7GB/s range. This new data suggests that not to be the case.

I don't think devs can work off the assumption that end users will be using the internal disk for their game. That would largely invalidate the utility of expandable storage if they did that. So if there was a performance difference between the internal drive and the recommended external spec (which nothing suggests that there is) then the devs would need to cater for the lowest common denominator.

And I totally agree that the overwhelming majority of cases should and will scale to slower drives with very minimal impact on gameplay. But it's possible to envisage cases where a slower drive might result in pop in, stuttering etc... if the devs had specifically targeted a faster performance profile that which the user has available. e.g. the claimed reloading of the world when the player turns around in R&C.

 

I don't see any problems when 99% (all multi platform) will run perfectly on 5.5gb/s disk but some ex will be recomanded to be installed on internal or 7gb/s+ disk

 

Well in the early days, some SSD manufacturers sold 256GiB SSDs as 256 GB SSDs (or 240GiB as 240GB) and others didn't. Maybe this SSD is one of those.
Btw, for SSDs the 1KB = 1000 bytes does not really make sense as everything inside of it is also designed in a binary way. They could write on the package >1TB (for real 1TiB) but that would look much stranger than this.

 

Seems you'd be fine with a 5.5Gb/s drive to match the PS5's top capabilities indeed. R&C devs stated they utilized what the PS5 had to offer in that regard. Its the forum hype that created a different idea of things (like with many other things PS related).

 

If you can play PS5 games off a regular-ole-off-the-shelf SSD of equal performance, what necessitates those proprietary 825 GB drives. Security?

It would seem advantageous for Sony to go with something more off the shelf so that it's not bound to designing a new proprietary drive every time it wants to offer more standard memory on the PS5.

 

I'm of the belief that going with a custom drive was cheaper for sony.

 

I believe their design decision was predated before real fast SSDs were projected to arrive. Some own controller+cache+low volume nvram chip orders can't be cheaper than ordering a batch from a volume supplier.

I also consider them using this as a PR gimmick move to separate themselves from MS. Neither would I be surprised if they never really invested deep R&D into the needs/requirement of bandwidth and latency so they just went with a big number instead to stay on the safe side.

 

cheaper parts. 6 Nand chips with lower frequencies vs 3 with higher frequencies. Also easier to cool etc.
But yes, in the end, they should just have used a standard m.2 SSD and it would be all right. In the end a standard 5.5 GB/s SSD is enough to more or less match the internal one. So they could have just went with this from the beginning. Now if the SSD fails, you can change the whole board instead just put a new SSD in it.
In the end, they not even have lower latencies because to access the external SSD the signals must pass through 2 controller chips. So we can assume that latencies aren't important, just raw bandwidth.
But a 5.5GB/s m.2 SSD should have even lower latencies than the internal of the PS5 because it normally just consist of 1-4 chips (so less than the PS5 has) an therefor higher frequencies are needed. So the only thing left is a cost thing why sony went with their own design. I guess the next iteration of the PS5 might just have another m.2 slot inside of it with the m.2 SSD. Might be cheaper in the long run than still having their own design on the board.

 

This is all in hindsight, ofcourse.

 

Some quarters, not Sony. From every Sony public communication it was stated that you need to match or slightly exceed the capability of PS5's internal SSD to maintain the same or similar user experience. 7GB/s or significantly faster was not communicated by Sony. This new data is in keeping with their public statement from last year.

Multiplatform devs are also creating games with Xbox Series X 2.4GB/s in mind, so why would they worry about Joe Blow putting an SSD that is slightly less than the recommended 5.5GB/s into PS5? Keeping in mind that gen4 NVMe SSD do not or I have yet to see one with less than 4GB/s sequential read. That is not a big difference from 5.5GB/s, 15% at best in actual usage. Sony also recommends moving games from the expanded storage to the internal one if you are having issues, so Sony expects all games to run flawless from the internal SSD which is the target for devs. I'm sure even if Sony first party and exclusive devs target 5.5GB/s they will still test using slower storage to make sure nothing is broken ala Insomniac games which seems to be Sony's go to showcase for the SSD.

Well it couldn't be for Multiplatform games because the target profile for all Multiplatform games would be XSX 2.4GB/s SSD for now gen only games. Pop in and stuttering are not going away, it is not solely a result of slower storage but the algorithms used for LOD management. That is something Unreal Engine 5 with the virtualized geometry solves to some extent. The acclaimed reloading of worlds when player turns around in R&C does not rely on 5.5GB/s bandwidth from storage.

 

That depends if they're using SFS on Xbox to get effective throughput close to or higher than 5.5 GB/s.

 

I seem to remember a quote from the Insomniac Dev saying that a whole world gets dumped from memory and a new one loads from instantly from the SSD. Same with a second world. This was suggesting that the 5.5GBps was a huge advantage for this dumping of worlds.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/08/31/ratchet-and-clank-ps5/

I would think that Cerny and the team stuck to the amount of SSD space due to cost constraints. When Sony were building the PS5, I take it prices of NAND memory chips weren't exactly cheap hence the reason for the final 825GB SSD size. They were able to utilize the fastest memory available for best price that they could bargain for and for the most amount of space that they could attain.

Must have done some hard bargaining I would expect. Great work from the team imo.

Prices have dropped, you can see with the latest/fastest SSD prices. It will get cheaper yet I take it Sony would have bargained for at a set price, which is likely to bite Sony in the ass at some point. Maybe they bargained prices on a sliding scale? Who knows!

While 3rd party devs would design for the lowest common denominator, first and second party devs would have no such restrictions if they are designing for the PS5 solely in mind and could design worlds that take advantage of the super fast SSD speeds.

 

Fast storage is an advantage when loading data. Whether you load 5GB worth of data in 2 seconds or 5GB in 1 second without taking into account compression. The end result is you are loading a lot of data very very fast. R&C loads entire world in less than a 2 seconds, the size of that world is unknown but it sure as hell is not loading 5.5GB worth of data every second of gameplay.

They did an amazing job in their design. When PS5 was being designed the fastest consumer SSD was ~4GB/s but that was below their target so they went for the cheapest and easiest way to achieve it which was more PCIe lanes and channels with slower NANDs. I think 825GB was not strictly about the price but the natural amount from using 12 channels times 64GiB stacked NAND to achieve 5.5GB/s. A higher tier 128GiB NAND would put them at 1.6TB as the base storage size. That would be saved for Pro model or the inevitable high tier storage model.

They are buying NAND, so much cheaper than buying a complete SSD package. The controller is custom so much cheaper as well than buying open market controller. They are all put together on the main motherboard and manufactured on the same automated line just like every other component. In the long run I think it is a cheaper way to achieve high bandwidth rather than buying a complete SSD package like the expansion port uses. They are already breaking even in manufacturing cost or expected to have already. The only fixed cost should be the manufacturing cost of the controller, the NAND ideal should be on a sliding scale.

And Insomniac games benchmarked their game against slower SSD and saw 15% difference which is not too bad at all. They don't need to now cater to slower drives because of 15% difference, that is an additional whopping 0.45 seconds in situations where the game is pushing the built in SSD. I don't think devs would worry about someone potentially seeing an increase of 0.45 seconds in loading or streaming of assets.

 

Sony did say a bit faster, and now they're recommending a drive that's exactly the same speed. So the messaging isn't completely consistent.

Multipltaform games that would already be catering to a lower common denominator aren't the concern though.

Why would they do that when they have a guaranteed minimum speed from the internal drive or recommended external drive?

It doesn't have to. It could be burst loading 550MB in 1/10th of a second, or 55MB in 100th of a second, it still amounts to the same max throughput. How do you now they're not relying on the maximum throughput of the drive in R&C at certain points? They could for example be directly tying the character turn speed to the maximum throughput of the drive. And even if they aren't in this game, it's not inconceivable they could do so in a future game. Even 15% slower could result in pop in galore in such a situation.

One could argue that it's not that difficult to design something in the now that's faster than the fastest currently available consumer devices that were designed months or years ago.

 

One thing I know for sure is Sony has completely upended the high speed SSD market by going custom. SSD manufacturers are having to lower prices and increase performance to match. This says to me that prices were overly inflated to begin with. Even MS could only manage a 2.4GBs drive with the same MSRP. Sony is absolutely saving money this way.

Visible pop in isn't a given depending on the texture streaming solution. XSX supposedly has more RAM available which would allow for a larger stream pool.

 

6 chips vs 1 chip?

They are forever bound to using 6 chips going forward for the entire generation I think. I'm not sure that's in favour of Sony in terms of cost especially as 1TB modules drop in price.

* 6x the surface area for cooling, the 6x amount of power...

* 6x the chance of getting a defective chip... a single one of those modules going defective affects your bandwidth, you'd have to RMA your PS5.

They made a huge move sure, but not sure if it's cheaper or will be for them going forward.

Typically as consoles reduce in cost to manufacture, they increase the amount of storage size. So this poses a slightly different challenge for PS5 than it would any other manufacturer, because Sony needs to increase their storage by 6x chips. Series consoles, for instance, would only need to move up to the next chip size, in this case, Series S can move to 1TB and Series X to 1 2TB when those come down enough in price.

I think there's a lot of discussion where people feel that MS is milking everyone for their $$$ for being proprietary, when many consumer NVMe drives are still not using single 1TB modules. So I'm unsure as to how much is cost for the single chip vs. being proprietary. I think in good time, these chips will become the norm as smart phones etc begin to take them on