Upgrading to SSD's for PS4, an awful choice?

[hesido]

We were re-discussing the game recording in the PS4 tech thread in terms of memory usage. Apparently I was misinformed by the Digital Foundry Twitter feed about the length of it.

When arijoytunir talked about whether there could be a flash storage for saving the video feed, as using GDDR5 for the job seemed so much overkill, dumbo11 reminded:

AFAIR, constantly writing to flash storage is a bad idea.

We know upgrading to SSD is not much of a bargain on the PS3 especially because it is probably bottlenecked at the decryption step. However, on PS4 people here seems to be more hopeful in terms of gains with an SSD.

(I'm leaving Xbox out of this discussion as its HD is not replaceable)

If the constant recording is on the hard-disk, the hard disk is going to face through a lot of writes to the same cells, over and over (I'm assuming it is going over the same space). 200 hours of gaming would result in re-writes of that segment 800 times for a 15 minute segment.

If this is the case, than upgrading the hard disk to an SSD would be a risky business. Your thoughts?

 

[humbertklyka]

If you cannot disable the feature, (though I see no reason for not allowing disabling), I still don't think that it should cause issues for the SSD over say 3 years.

The writes will be spread over the entire drive, based on how the SSD choses to write data, so it wont affect some specific cells.

The available writes should be in order of 3000*0.128 = 384TB, writes used by the recording, assuming 20h gaming per week, with 10MB/s writes (which I assume is no way will be used), would lead to 10Mb*3600s*20h*52weeks/1000/1000 = 37TB / year.

So it should be safe for most users.

 

[dumbo11]

The available writes should be in order of 3000*0.128 = 384TB, writes used by the recording, assuming 20h gaming per week, with 10MB/s writes (which I assume is no way will be used), would lead to 10Mb*3600s*20h*52weeks/1000/1000 = 37TB / year.

So it should be safe for most users.

My original post was in the context of a small flash device for only storing the recorded data.

In terms of an SSD, the maths above looks correct, but obviously depends on how much of the SSD is 'free'. If you've installed a pair of 50GB games, and the OS takes up 10GB, then things start to look awkward.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I'm curious about the use of an external USB 3.0 SSD drive. I'm hoping that'll work on both next-gen systems. No need to swap the drives. Just install the games to the external drive and let the system stuff run on the built in one.

 

[humbertklyka]

My original post was in the context of a small flash device for only storing the recorded data.

In terms of an SSD, the maths above looks correct, but obviously depends on how much of the SSD is 'free'. If you've installed a pair of 50GB games, and the OS takes up 10GB, then things start to look awkward.

Ah, I was clearly not reading your post properly. For a small flash device I agree that it will not be feasible.

In case of a SSD approaching full, you would get worse write amplification, since the SSD would shuffle data around to avoid killing individual cells prematurely. The OS could always reserve more space to ensure good longevity, though the downside would of course be annoying if you want to use the entire space to install games on it.

Clearly PS4 should come with MRAM by default

 

[PixResearch]

Surely the bigger issue would be if there is TRIM support?

 

[Pressure]

Surely the bigger issue would be if there is TRIM support?

Doesn't matter on modern controllers, so it's less of an issue.

Standard TLC NAND flash can be written to on an daily basis for at least 10GB and still survive 23 years. MLC fares better and SLC would be fine for many more years.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Doesn't matter on modern controllers, so it's less of an issue.

Standard TLC NAND flash can be written to on an daily basis for at least 10GB and still survive 23 years. MLC fares better and SLC would be fine for many more years.

That's only true if you have either a fairly large reserve or you purposely make sure most of the drive doesn't contain any data that isn't removed on a regular basis (making sure to uninstall games you aren't playing currently, for example). Otherwise the benefits of wear leveling start to degrade quite significantly and your drive endurance starts to suffer significantly.

Regards,
SB

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Most people cannot afford to put a SSD drive in day one. Maybe couple years from now but for a 1TB drive you are taking over $600.

I plan to install a 1 TB SSHD.

 

[dagamer]

Do PS4 games automatically install themselves to the hard drive? Would wear leveling algorithms be smart enough to rearrange bits to cells which are rarely written to because a game may be stored there?

 

[hesido]

Most people cannot afford to put a SSD drive in day one. Maybe couple years from now but for a 1TB drive you are taking over $600.

I plan to install a 1 TB SSHD.

I think there'll be benchmarks comparing those to stock HDisks, it may not provide any benefits from a normal one, but I'm guessing they'd work in self-optimized mode. Would be nice if there was OS support for it (maybe it comes free with the freeBSD back bone? )

Do PS4 games automatically install themselves to the hard drive? Would wear leveling algorithms be smart enough to rearrange bits to cells which are rarely written to because a game may be stored there?

Yes, they do install, transparent to user. Don't know the rest

 

[humbertklyka]

Do PS4 games automatically install themselves to the hard drive? Would wear leveling algorithms be smart enough to rearrange bits to cells which are rarely written to because a game may be stored there?

The wear leveling would of course depend on the SSD in question, but in order not to reduce available space due to some pages hitting the limit, I would be very surprised if data was not constantly shuffled around.

In some reviews of SSDs they look into this write amplification, which can reach 10x when the drives start getting filled in stress testing, so clearly a lot of data is being updated on the actual drive, even with small intended writes.

 

[novcze]

Most people cannot afford to put a SSD drive in day one. Maybe couple years from now but for a 1TB drive you are taking over $600.

Maybe 128GB will be enough and affordable for day one updrade. I also said that 1TB will be best choice considering all PS+ games but if you're after performance, SSD is really only choice.
We have game suspend feature on PS4 but it doesn't look so hot if you want to play another game next day or if you have two or more days between gaming sessions and you don't want your PS4 to be in suspend mode all the time.

 

[Deleted member 7537]

How about a hybrid?

 

[Grall]

Hybrid drives right now are best for OS installs and some often-used applications. There's not enough NAND on current models to fit much more than that (due to price, mostly), if you have dozens of dozens-of-gigs games installed on the drive, one game's gonna flush the other out of the NAND cache and you'll never get any speedup.

 

[-tkf-]

I wouldn't worry to much, but here is a good writeup, and remember the recordings will be compressed so they will not be big.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-the-endurance-of-tlc-nand

 

[novcze]

I wouldn't worry to much, but here is a good writeup, and remember the recordings will be compressed so they will not be big.

Recording loop will be in RAM I suppose or maybe we can turn off that function? ... we will know before or short after PS4 release so final decision must wait for now.

Anyway it would be nice from Sony if they say, we support SSD and we have TRIM ... maybe someone should tweet Shuhei Yoshida with question.

 

[dagamer]

Recording loop will be in RAM I suppose or maybe we can turn off that function? ... we will know before or short after PS4 release so final decision must wait for now.

Anyway it would be nice from Sony if they say, we support SSD and we have TRIM ... maybe someone should tweet Shuhei Yoshida with question.

Yeah, I'd be weary of sticking a smaller SSD into a PS4 without TRIM as if you full it up, you can easy turn into a worse performer than a mechanical drive. The OS will also do HDD defragmentation which harms the lifespan of an SSD. And the constant recording feature isn't too SSD-friendly either.

 

[Grall]

Yeah, I'd be weary of sticking a smaller SSD into a PS4 without TRIM as if you full it up, you can easy turn into a worse performer than a mechanical drive.

"Easy", if you run constant random write benchmarks on the drive, yes. Not just by sticking it in a console and using it normally; the drive's own garbage collection mechanism will be quite capable of keeping it fit.

The OS will also do HDD defragmentation which harms the lifespan of an SSD.

Not necessarily, since SSDs can be detected by the console firmware (if supported.) In any case, some spurious writes won't do much in the way of lifespan reduction.

And the constant recording feature isn't too SSD-friendly either.

Doesn't really matter. It's pretty much impossible to actually wear out even a small SSD with normal use. The recording bitrate is too low to wreck the drive in any reasonable amount of time.

 

[dagamer]

"Easy", if you run constant random write benchmarks on the drive, yes. Not just by sticking it in a console and using it normally; the drive's own garbage collection mechanism will be quite capable of keeping it fit.


Not necessarily, since SSDs can be detected by the console firmware (if supported.) In any case, some spurious writes won't do much in the way of lifespan reduction.


Doesn't really matter. It's pretty much impossible to actually wear out even a small SSD with normal use. The recording bitrate is too low to wreck the drive in any reasonable amount of time.

Ahh, you caught me.

Still, I'd feel better about explicit support to keep it at top performance.