Sony PS5 NVME Expansion Options?

But isn't a 3rd party SSD going to have/use it's own controller? ...

 

I don't think so.

e.g., on Apple devices, the SSD controller is also custom (It has additional security-related logic) according to their iOS security whitepaper.

... which is why it is a misnomer to call this a "Fast SSD" solution. It's a sophisticated asset streaming platform; fast SSD is just part of the formula.

 

Off the shelf SSD's don't have their own controller?...

 

https://www.storagereview.com/ssd-controller

 

Right so if the "magic is in the controller"...and you have an off-the-shelf SSD that uses a different controller...then how much of the magic do you still have?...

 

There are custom logic to deal with the priority level "shortfall" in regular SSD somewhere in the chain.
I have no idea where Mark Cerny address this. We will probably know more after PS5 launches.

All we know so far is, they need extra time to test and qualify 3rd party SSDs.

EDIT:
I took another look at Sweeney's comments on this subsystem. He noted the advanced storage architecture, latency and bandwidth optimizations without going into the details (probably NDA'ed).

 

For a 4TB Nvme ssd your looking at $700 + and that's for a lower drive with read speeds of 3.2GB/s https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Rock...words=2tb+nvme+ssd&qid=1592164448&sr=8-4&th=1

Your looking at $400 for a 2TB ssd with 5gb read speeds. I'm a believer that prices will come down but I'm not sure how fast for the higher capacity higher speed drives.

 

The prices have already massively tumbled from a few years back.

 

prices drop every year , but 4TB nvme drives are new so i don't see them dropping quickly esp at the higher end of the speed spectrum. Typically you see the drops at the lower mid range of the product stack. So the lowest end seems to stop around $50 and floats there while the range from a 100-$200 will drop as capacity goes up. The pricing over $200 seems to stay stable

 

Sorry, I'm looking at regular 4Tb SSDs for the external storage. I hope I won't need to expand the internal storage for a good 12 months. And as long as there is a fast/convenient way to offload internal SSD to external for archive/restore, I can probably make that internal 825Gb last 18-24 months.

I'm very interested to see how fast accessing the external storage over USB is and whether going SSD over a fat HDD is worth it.

 

The "magic" in the PS5 is in the IO unit, not the controller. The controller seems capable of using 6 priority levels vs 2 (although I thought it was really 3) for standard NVMe. That seems to be the only major difference from a performance perspective vs a a PC drive that would see the same throughput.

It's the IO unit that seems to handle the DMA (although regular NVMe's could do that too), the decompression and the coherency work. That's where the real magic happens.

You can imagine a scenario whereby the 6 priority levels used by PS5 games are mapped onto the 2-3 priority levels supported by a commercial drive, and hence where a game requests 3 lots of data with priority levels 1,2 and 3, the SSD returns them in order from first to last of 3,2,1 because they are all the same priority from it's perspective. So the game may get the data that was it's 3rd priority before it gets the data that was it's 1st priority. Hence getting all the data faster than the PS5 baseline could potentially account for that. How much real world impact that will have is anyone's guess.

 

i can tell you from my setup that using an external ssd is much faster than a HDD.

 

Also I expect USB to be 3.2 version although there does seem to be a USB port as well in the front and I can't say if that's USB3.0. Maybe a USB3.0 in the back?

 

who knows , the usb 3 spec is so weird .

But still most external high capacity ssd's are sata so usb 3 is enough to make a real difference vs mechanical drives

 

One thing is for sure, expanding the storage will not be a cheap endeavour. I remember it cost me around £80 to put a nice 2TB HDD in my PS4. This will be multiples of that.

 

wont you still be limited by the custom flash controller from the nvme drive ? Sony's engine wont take effect until after it leaves the nvme ?

 

I mean if you need something faster than 6gb/s your just going to pay extremely cutting edge tax. A 1tb pci-e 4 nvme drive hitting 5gb/s is $250 itself

 

Well hopefully a year after the PS5 release it might be $125 or less.