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

[Silent_Buddha]

So do you actually think that a modern ssd will be slower than a mechanical 2.5 drive in a ps4 at some point. I am just wondering what real life scenario that would have to happen for this to happen. We are talking about writes, right? When do you see a ssd being outpaced by a mechanical 2.5 drive, is there even any examples with modern ssd where this can be shown?

As long as you leave a reasonable amount of spare drive area, then it shouldn't be a problem. If PS4 doesn't have TRIM then you'd want to leave a larger spare area than if it does have TRIM.

As well, drives like the Crucial M500 with highly aggressive GC would help with that at the potential of lower than max read speed when GC kicks in.

Samsung has gone a different route by equipping their Samsung 840 EVO with a small bit of each NAND dedicated as an SLC write cache (from 3 GB total on smaller drives up to 12 GB total on larger drives) as well as a large DDR RAM cache (from 256 MB up to 1 GB on the largest drives). It doesn't help with large sustained writes (game installs for example) but does speed up smaller transfers quite nicely as well as giving a writer buffer for small writes if you somehow manage to fill up the drive so much that it triggers a block erase on write. Although since game installs will come from optical media in most cases (rather than network copy or transfer from another HDD) then even that isn't going to stress the drive much.

Since large file transfers are likely to be relatively rare on a PS4 compared to a PC, the Samsung 840 EVO might be the best drive available for use as a replacement drive. It also doesn't hurt that it's a fairly economical drive. A 500 GB Samsung 840 EVO would have 512 MB of DDR cache, ~6 GB of SLC write cache, and ~12 GB of spare area for wear leveling with a reasonable MSRP of ~370 USD.

If I were to get a PS4 and replace the drive that comes with it, that would likely be at the top of my choices.

Regards,
SB

 

[JPT]

But a 500GB drive will not last long, I got one in my PS3 (not ssd) and the price of the EVO 1TB is almost the double of the PS4

I'd love to have on in a PS4, but its a bit expensive...

 

[Silent_Buddha]

But a 500GB drive will not last long, I got one in my PS3 (not ssd) and the price of the EVO 1TB is almost the double of the PS4

I'd love to have on in a PS4, but its a bit expensive...

Once people start discussing the desire to put an SSD in their PS4 in the first place, then they are likely already ready to pay a hefty premium to have faster loading and streaming.

Ideally, Sony will allow users to install games to external media like the competition, but they haven't announced anything regarding that. That way instead of replacing your existing storage, you're expanding it.

Regards,
SB

 

[novcze]

Ideally, Sony will allow users to install games to external media like the competition, but they haven't announced anything regarding that. That way instead of replacing your existing storage, you're expanding it.

yep, internal SSD for the most used games and external HDD for everything else, that will be ideal

 

[JPT]

Fine that you expect to pay a premium, but for most people I suspect there is a value for money angle here also. Of course bragging rights are important.

By itself, I would not mind paying 600 USD for a 1TB SSD drive, but not for use in a gaming console.
Personally I just do not see the SSD improving the experience enough to justify not buying the other console instead for instance.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Fine that you expect to pay a premium, but for most people I suspect there is a value for money angle here also. Of course bragging rights are important.

By itself, I would not mind paying 600 USD for a 1TB SSD drive, but not for use in a gaming console.
Personally I just do not see the SSD improving the experience enough to justify not buying the other console instead for instance.

Hmmm? You can use an SSD to store games on the competition's console as well. Except there, instead of replacing the drive the console came with, it's in addition to the drive the console came with.

Hell, if you had the money to blow, you could run SSD's or HDD's in an external RAID enclosure and have your games run off of that at which point the limiting factor becomes the USB 3.0 transfer rate (5 Gbit/s versus 6 Gbit/s for SATA 3).

Regards,
SB

 

[JPT]

Even if the interface puts a limit on the top speed, does the experience reflect the potential upgrade you are buying into? I mean yes the SSD is much quicker than a HDD and on my laptop its quite noticable. But do you really notice it on a gaming console? Is the HDD speed the big bad bottleneck for games?

 

[MrFox]

Even if the interface puts a limit on the top speed, does the experience reflect the potential upgrade you are buying into? I mean yes the SSD is much quicker than a HDD and on my laptop its quite noticable. But do you really notice it on a gaming console? Is the HDD speed the big bad bottleneck for games?

I think it's mostly about load times. Most modern SSDs are above 500MB/s. So if a level loads in 5 seconds instead of 30 seconds, I'd say it's worth it.
In theory the OS too should load faster, but they reserved so much memory for it that I think it won't make any difference, it should be snappy either way..

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Even if the interface puts a limit on the top speed, does the experience reflect the potential upgrade you are buying into? I mean yes the SSD is much quicker than a HDD and on my laptop its quite noticable. But do you really notice it on a gaming console? Is the HDD speed the big bad bottleneck for games?

For level loads as MrFox mentioned, it might. To avoid bad texture pop in for streaming games, it might. How noticeable will be up to how the game is loaded/streamed and how sensitive people are to it.

And obviously as you climb up the price/perf. ladder you'll have less and less people that think it is worth it. But just as there are people that are more than willing to pay an extra 600-1000 USD for 5% more performance in a PC game, I'm sure there'll be people on console willing to do the same for lesser loading times and/or better streaming performance.

Regards,
SB

 

[novcze]

I think it's mostly about load times. Most modern SSDs are above 500MB/s. So if a level loads in 5 seconds instead of 30 seconds, I'd say it's worth it.
In theory the OS too should load faster, but they reserved so much memory for it that I think it won't make any difference, it should be snappy either way..

OS will run quick thanks to all that reserved RAM, but when you boot up everything will also load faster with SSD.

 

[kijjy]

I got a 300gb 10,000 rpm WD raptor HDD i am thinking about putting in my ps4 when i get one this fall. I am sure its alot faster then the included HDD

 

[BRiT]

I got a 300gb 10,000 rpm WD raptor HDD i am thinking about putting in my ps4 when i get one this fall. I am sure its alot faster then the included HDD

It might be slower depending on the data density of the drive included in the PS4 and how old of a drive your WD Raptor is. I've seen newer drives with 1TB-per-platter @5900rpm run faster than drives with 750GB-per-platter @7200rpm.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

The 10k drive will still have faster random seek times, but could quite likely have slower linear read/write speeds, depending on how it is as BRiT noted. On average though for game loading seek times are slightly more important depending on the game. For OS booting, a 5400 RPM drive with higher track density may be faster as the OS files should be organized for linear read unless the OS provider didn't bother.

Regards,
SB

 

[novcze]

https://twitter.com/yosp/status/373623812681523200

so much for external HDD games install

 

[Deleted member 13524]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8_nt2Dwf78#t=15

Looks like installing a SSD will dramatically improve loading times.

 

[Jedi2016]

Based on what I know of the way the system is constantly caching data to the drives (and I hadn't even thought of the 15-minute video recording it's doing at all times), I would not recommend an SSD. While they have significantly improved the write lifetime of the drives through various methods over the years, they haven't licked it entirely, and it will probably die far sooner than the average HDD in the same circumstances. Is the speed/money tradeoff worth it? Only you can decide.

 

[MrFox]

Based on what I know of the way the system is constantly caching data to the drives (and I hadn't even thought of the 15-minute video recording it's doing at all times), I would not recommend an SSD. While they have significantly improved the write lifetime of the drives through various methods over the years, they haven't licked it entirely, and it will probably die far sooner than the average HDD in the same circumstances. Is the speed/money tradeoff worth it? Only you can decide.

That's a myth.

Write lifetime is about 1000 times the capacity depending on brand and technology. There's no way to reach that amount of writes with the the game install or even the game recording (which, right now, is assumed to be in memory, not continuously written on HDD)

http://techreport.com/review/25559/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-200tb-update

The media wear and SSD life attributes we've been tracking haven't budged since testing began, so it's hard to know which numbers to trust. It's important to keep things in perspective, though. We've written 200TB to the drives—the equivalent of more than 100GB per day for five years—and most of the SSDs are completely intact. Even though a decent-sized portion of the 840 Series' flash has expired, the drive appears to be far from failure.

 

[joker454]

Yeah we've been using only ssd's on our laptops and pc's for about 2 years now, relegating mechanical drives to raid only use. Even as a boot drive on my previous work pc which did daily rendering among other things, we've never had any issues with ssd. That same heavily used Intel ssd is now the boot drive of my gaming pc and I just added a second bigger ssd to install games on. No issues whatsoever, they just keep on truckin. If I had a console the first thing I would do is replace it's mechanical hdd with an ssd, no question about that.

 

[dobwal]

Yeah XtremeSystems has a thread going where a Samsung sdd rated at 800TB of writes hit the 6000TB mark.

SDD aren't as fragile as the plain jane interpretation of PE would indicate.

Worse come to worse, all you have to do is save your original PS4 drive and drop it back in if you have a sdd failure.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Are there even reports of SATA SSDs failing due to wear?

Honest question.