Sony PS5 NVME Expansion Options?

If you're not jumping around a dozen games at a time, use and external, cheap HDD for archiving and wait until SSD prices for expansions are nice and cheap. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Right but will a 3rd party NVMe drive use the internal 'custom flash controller' or its own?...

Edit: I guess it comes down to how much of the "magic" is done in the flash controller vs I/O chip...

 

On a PC yes, on a PS5 running PS4 games? I'm waiting for solid information. Nothing we're heard about PS5 suggests this should be a problem, indeed the entire architecture of PS5 is designed to leverage maximum I/O performance, but I'd like to know how much faster PS4 games will be on an external SSD connected via USB compared to a HDD. I want to know this before I drop the rough equivalent of the probable cost of the PS5 itself on a SSD primarily for those PS4 games and some other archiving needs.

 

I'm exactly in the same situation. Though I already have a few external units I'll be migrating over that are both close to 85% full. And I uninstalled games I completed that I wont be revisiting soon. I have 2TB SSD and 4TB HDD. I dont know how much the difference of those two will be for NextGen. The current gen is already limited by other aspects that the difference isnt as noticeable as you would think. Loading Borderlands3 takes way too many dancing claptraps.

It should be more economical to pick up a 8TB HDD, but copying entire game collections to or from HDD takes so long, so juggling games to mechanical spinners may be annoying enough where I pick up another external SSD.

 

I’m sure this is a stupid question but.

What would happen if theoretically we put an nvme SSD in there that doesn’t quite run at the minimum required speed? Would it not work? Would it run thing slowly? Surely that would break things for games like, say, R&C which might be requesting gigs of data for those weird dimensional warp thingies?

 

Patching with software priority queues can be problematic because the drive needs hundreds of entries in it's hardware queue to reach peak performance (i.e. at least 0.05ms worth of operations). So if it's already filled with a lot of requests, the software priority queues would be a bit less effective since it would still serve existing requests first. They will need to keep the two queues relatively short to manage the priorities outside of the nand controller, and that will decrease the overall throughput from the peak figure. But anything can be done in software if the hardware queues are kept relatively short. I have used this trick on a file server to implement a software assisted QoS.

Some people have said nvme have more than 2 priorities, but those are weighted round-robin within a single queue, they are not absolute priority queues, and even worse is that they are optional in the specs. That's probably why Cerny said nvme only has "two true priority levels".

 

Good discussion but let's try to stray back on topic of PS5 Expansion and save the PC System Impact for the other threads like A or B --
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/blazing-fast-nvmes-and-direct-storage-api-for-pcs-spawn.61761/
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/pc-system-impacts-from-tech-like-ue5-storage-ram-spawn.61744/

 

I've not seen this discussed here yet:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps5-new-era-of-gaming/4

Some really in depth info about both consoles storage solutions here including around the additional speed requirement for expandable drives in the PS5. They seem to think 6.5GB/s would be more than enough.

 

So an extra ~ 18% on the top end to account for less priority channels?

 

I read this today, it's a good read but Anandtech concede it involves a lot of guesswork.

 

I would assume (because it's wise to ) the OS will benchmark a new drive. The 360 did some tests for USB media if I recall.

 

But how long will it have to benchmark third party devices to make sure it being used constantly doesnt trigger throttling? Or does it present that as a warning to the user so they're aware it might be an issue?

 

Cache scrubbing?

 

The test has to be comprehensive, I can see this taking a few minutes at least. But this is something that only needs to be done once for each drive and will surely be part of the drive's initialisation/formatting.

 

The PS5 has coherency engines on the main chip which it uses to communicate with the GPU and its custom cache scrubbers.

 

I know what it does but where did you get the info that this is handled by the I/O controller?