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Sony certifying 5.5Gb/s raw SSDs as additional PS5 storage is is worrying - heres how and why

John Wick

Member
There was never an advantage to begin with, no magic, no secret sauce, just marketing and fantasies. But that house of cards has been falling down for some time already with all the loading times comparisons, where on PS5 there were suppose to be none, instantaneous, maybe 1s long in worst case scenario, while the reality couldn't be any more different. But that still didn't stop people from believing that PS5 SSD will outperform and RTX GPU.


PS. But I have to say it is entertaining to see how people who claimed that you don't need more space because of Kraken compression, and that you typically uninstall games you've finished anyway, are now so eager to expand their storage. Ironic.gif.
Talk about selective memory? No one thought the PS5 SSD would make it have more GPU grunt. Now your just being stupid. No one claimed PS5 games would load in a second. Again stating more nonsense. Games on PS5 do load faster than previous gen. Much faster. Demon Souls is 2-3 secs between levels. Same with R&C,MM etc. Where the SSD and IO will help is an how much data is loaded every second or every frame. This will help greatly in graphics qualtity as much higher textures can be streamed in freeing up more ram.
 

jroc74

Phone reception is more important to me than human rights
TIL that all the I/O, data tech in the PS5 means absolutely nothing, according to all this concern lately.

......the physical drive in the PS5 is 5.5GB/s......

Has that stopped, hurt anything yet?
 

Mr Moose

Member
Well I don’t know then, XSX is 2.4 minimum and 4 max?
DF have to do an internal to m2/expansion transfer speed comparison on the same game! Clock the consoles when moving MLB or something
It's 2.4GB/s. The max speed for 4 x2 is 4GB/s.
 

ZoukGalaxy

Member
You seriously need to chill out and take some holidays buddy.

arnold schwarzenegger relax GIF
 

Mr Moose

Member
How we work out Mb/s as I only have the XSX and a extra seagate external drive. And am getting (using online calculator) 4442Mb/s transferring between the internal and the external. (42.4GB took 1:16 to transfer, from pressing A to it vanishing from the queue)

In that article Xbox is sustained 2.4Gb/s, yet am getting almost double that between drives. So is that 2.4Gb/s the minimum it will drop to?

I was actually shocked how fast it transferred 😂
That's write speed, silly goose.
Edit: Also, gonna need a video as proof because doubt.jpg
I did the math, that's 600MB/s write speed. It would take 17.5 seconds to write 42GB @ 2.4GB/s (someone correct me if I am wrong).
 
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Mr Moose

Member
Okay and the Gammix S50 is maxing out at 3.9gb/s with PCIe4.0x4? If Ratchet can run on that drive, wouldn’t that mean that it could, in theory, run on the XSX drive as well?
4 x4 is 8GB/s max. Probably yeah.
Edit: This bit will be an interesting test which I hope someone like DF does with the slower drive:
 
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Connxtion

Member
This is some truly dumb s..t. Your comparing transfering games from one drive to another to actual games using the storage? Well done you are genius. I don't understand why Sony and MS just don't employ you for their technical SSD stuff?
Because that’s how 90% of the videos and webpages out there are testing the drive speeds as it’s the only way to do so 🤷‍♂️
 

sncvsrtoip

Member
possible thats 6 priority levels doesn't change that much and indeed 5.5gb/s is enough for all casses, hw kraken decompressor is probably more important and it also work with additional ssd's
in terms of performance, that custom decompressor equates to nine of our Zen 2 cores
 

Fredrik

Member
4 x4 is 8GB/s max. Probably yeah.
I had no idea, I mean I played through The Medium and it had some cool scene switching but Ratchet was on a whole other level, I thought that was one of those proper ”can’t run elsewhere” games.
 
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Okay and the Gammix S50 is maxing out at 3.9gb/s with PCIe4.0x4? If Ratchet can run on that drive, wouldn’t that mean that it could, in theory, run on the XSX drive as well?

Well on paper the XSX drive runs at half the speed. I guess it could but I don't see it running the same. Just looking at the I/O specs mind you.
 
I had no idea, I mean I played through The Medium and it had some cool scene switching but Ratchet was on a whole other level, I thought that was one of those proper ”can’t run elsewhere” games.

Well if the hardware is similar it should work. But if it's behind then it won't work as well. Kind of like how the XSX edges out with resolution and how the PS5 has better I/O performance in games.
 

Connxtion

Member
That's write speed, silly goose.
Edit: Also, gonna need a video as proof because doubt.jpg
I did the math, that's 600MB/s write speed. It would take 17.5 seconds to write 42GB @ 2.4GB/s (someone correct me if I am wrong).
When I get home I will record a video.

Game I used MSF2020.
 

Mr Moose

Member
I had no idea, I mean I played through The Medium and it had some cool scene switching but Ratchet was on a whole other level, I thought that was one of those proper ”can’t run elsewhere” games.
The rift/world loading should be easy enough, might take a little longer with a slower drive.
We need some tests of this:


When I get home I will record a video.

Game I used MSF2020.
(42.4GB took 1:16 to transfer, from pressing A to it vanishing from the queue) - This is 1 minute 16 seconds, right? I think that's roughly 600MB/s write speed. Someone who is good at maths can fix my numbers maybe because I suck lol :messenger_grinning_sweat: The read speed is normally faster than the write.
 
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Well I don’t know then, XSX is 2.4 minimum and 4 max?
DF have to do an internal to m2/expansion transfer speed comparison on the same game! Clock the consoles when moving MLB or something
If it can max the PCIe4x2 than 4gbs is it's max
That's write speed, silly goose.
Edit: Also, gonna need a video as proof because doubt.jpg
I did the math, that's 562MB/s write speed.
Seems inline with the ps5 write tests though....I think. Can't find that Reddit post in this thread.
 

Mr Moose

Member
If it can max the PCIe4x2 than 4gbs is it's max

Seems inline with the ps5 write tests though....I think. Can't find that Reddit post in this thread.
I seen something about it the other day, and the 3rd party SSD was something like twice as fast at writing, I'll try and find the video.
Edit:

Ratchet and Clank

Ps5 Main SSD:
  • Time to menu 7.51s
  • Time to game 1.79s
  • Time to move 2m33s
Samsung:
  • Time to menu 7.55s
  • Time to game 1.86s
  • Time to move 1m4s
Not sure how big R & C is though, I'll try and find out.
33.6GB(?) If my shit maths is correct, it's 240MB/s writing and 540MB/s for the Samsung(?).
 
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cormack12

Gold Member
It's eight months old. Not every game is going to need the full bandwidth and not every game is going to really be pushing as hard as it can yet. These are the first generation games. Plus different file and block compositions will transfer differently depending on quantity or length of time etc.

They will be aiming for a range of speed not down to the exact millisecond
 

Excess

Member
I still contend that the SSD puffery is just another tertiary talking point for an otherwise lackluster hardware reveal from both Sony and Microsoft.

It reminds me a lot of things such as blast processing, cell processors, and eSRAM. These were all "revolutionary" when considered in isolation, but they had no real-world effect when coupled with thousands of different variables.
 

3liteDragon

Member
It's eight months old. Not every game is going to need the full bandwidth and not every game is going to really be pushing as hard as it can yet. These are the first generation games. Plus different file and block compositions will transfer differently depending on quantity or length of time etc.

They will be aiming for a range of speed not down to the exact millisecond
Finally, someone that gets it.
 

Loope

Member
Talk about selective memory? No one thought the PS5 SSD would make it have more GPU grunt. Now your just being stupid. No one claimed PS5 games would load in a second. Again stating more nonsense. Games on PS5 do load faster than previous gen. Much faster. Demon Souls is 2-3 secs between levels. Same with R&C,MM etc. Where the SSD and IO will help is an how much data is loaded every second or every frame. This will help greatly in graphics qualtity as much higher textures can be streamed in freeing up more ram.
No one? You sure about that? No one? I wish i had the time to scour that tech thread, because i pretty sure i remember reading just that, i even asked a question about it, because so many people were talking like the SSD will somehow circunvent the GPU limitations.
 
It reminds me a lot of things such as blast processing, cell processors, and eSRAM. These were all "revolutionary" when considered in isolation, but they had no real-world effect when coupled with thousands of different variables.

I would have agreed with you if we had at least 32GB of RAM this generation, preferably 64GB. But due to the fact that DRAM stopped scaling below 10nm, that amount of increase in RAM is impossible now.

But the problem with this generation is the miniscule increase in RAM. From 5.5GB (usable) to 13GB? (usable?). That would pose problems when developers start to take advantage of the new hardware. The ultra fast SSD will mitigate the lack of RAM because it will be able to feed the RAM with data 'just in time'.
 

Excess

Member
But the problem with this generation is the miniscule increase in RAM. From 5.5GB (usable) to 13GB? (usable?). That would pose problems when developers start to take advantage of the new hardware. The ultra fast SSD will mitigate the lack of RAM because it will be able to feed the RAM with data 'just in time'.
Agreed. I don't want to make it sound like it's just straight-up marketing. For example, PS3's cell processor was actually as impressive as it was on paper, but the real-world results were not realized until the end of the console's life cycle. There will be a lot to iron out before utilization, and when it reaches full maturity, it may go largely unnoticed.
 

Fredrik

Member
Here's what happens if you install a slower SSD:

IMG_1307.jpg


I guess what happened is they allowed slower drives, with the caveat that in the future games may require the full performance of installing it to the internal drive if you opt for a slower drive than the old recommendation.
That’s a good solution tbh. I’m not obsessed about 2s load times, I just want more storage, unless I get constant fps stutter or something like that I can easily use a slower drive.
 

John Wick

Member
No one? You sure about that? No one? I wish i had the time to scour that tech thread, because i pretty sure i remember reading just that, i even asked a question about it, because so many people were talking like the SSD will somehow circunvent the GPU limitations.
Are you for real? There are clowns on both sides. The MrXmedia types which state nonsense all the time. Are you actually taking that nonsense seriously?
 

Orion2

Banned
2 posts up says it's about 4gbs
the xbox series s/x ssd is 2.4gb/s raw, ps5 ssd is 5.5gb/s raw and has extra hardware customizations

about the topic, I don't think any game is 100% utilizing the PS5 SSD or the stuff it can do with compression up to 20gb +, I remember a Bluepoint interview saying they do around 1.5gb/s maybe 2gb/s transfers with the SSD and that's about it, plenty of devs, even Insomniac I think came out and said that they actually don't know what to do with the full capabilities and their engines are not even ready to handle it 100% so they don't
 
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ZywyPL

Banned
Talk about selective memory? No one thought the PS5 SSD would make it have more GPU grunt. Now your just being stupid. No one claimed PS5 games would load in a second. Again stating more nonsense. Games on PS5 do load faster than previous gen. Much faster. Demon Souls is 2-3 secs between levels. Same with R&C,MM etc. Where the SSD and IO will help is an how much data is loaded every second or every frame. This will help greatly in graphics qualtity as much higher textures can be streamed in freeing up more ram.

The infamous Next-Gen Speculations thread is this way -->


Maybe it's you who has selective memory, but luckily for you all the BS that spawned after Road to PS5 presentation is still there within that thread, along with ~200 or so dedicated threads about the so-called "Game Changing Paradigm Shift™".

And no, the SSD and it's I/O won't increase the console's graphics quality, because it doesn't matter if the assets take 100MB, 1GB or 10GB if the GPU can't make a picture out of them within targeted frametime.

The PS5 SSD is nothing but equivalent of The Power Of The Cloud™, where some people desperately wanted to believe their beloved plastic box is better than the other one, but we all know well how it ended up last time, and this time won't be any different.
 
So finaly i found time to respond to a few Points that were made since my last entry here..

So relax everyone - like a few posters pointed out- English is not my first Language. So the introducing Sentence of me being exhausted was to powerfull of a statement. I chose the wrong words haha
I am fine .
UwB7cfd.gif


I see where he is coming from. It gets tiring being lied to all the time, and Sony has done that a lot lately.

But like I said to him, it's time to move on. This is the reality of doing business in 2021. You cant expect a console company to make games exclusively for consoles anymore. If anything, I have come around to liking this. They bought Nixxes to port everything to PC, most likely on day one which means I will no longer have to sacrifice resolution and ray tracing for 60 fps. A 3080 even without DLSS should run every PS5 game at 2x the framerate. No need to spend an extra $500 on a mid gen console. No need to pay them $60 per year for 7 years for PSN either. This is actually a good thing.

I was and still am worried to an extend that Sony just forgets the People who made them this big. They are in Position now thanks to their loyal Fanbase to even produce High Quality TV Shows of of their Games Portfolio (TLOU for example)
iam absolutly no Warrior who trys to fight Sony for porting games in the first Place. I just dont want that PS5 games suffer from this. A big reason for the Quality of PS4 Exclusives was that Developers could focus on delivering the Game and not be bothered by a myriad of hardware combinations on PC. So PS5 first! Then later do the Port.
Some how this Beta Anouncement made me think they would even go as far as compromise their own Machine... a somewhat faulty assumption , i found out by reading through some of the Answers ;)

fuck me m8, you need to step away from gaming if this shit gets your knickers in a twist to this extent, Sony is fucking business and in the business of making money m8, not some religion
I will not fuck you :messenger_kissing_smiling:

You are mixing the Kraken unit specs with the minimum spec of the SSD in the Beta Testing program… the I/O processor does not even feed from the SSD, but from a hierarchy that sees an SRAM scratchpad and a DRAM based cache (that XSX|S does not have) that is connected to the SSD controller btw.

Priority levels difference mostly affect latency over throughput, but the “overhead for bridging the gap in priority levels being almost 2 GB/s out of 5.5 GB/s” but is not confirmed anywhere. Of course a tech enthusiast with a lot of cash is going to splurge for the fastest possible drive, it will not make the console performer worse and might even beat the internal drive.

After the beta the 5.5 GB/s drive with non compatible internal controller might be banned or improvements in the PS5’s FW and/or the SSD’s themselves (compared to early last year predictions) might allow the performance degradation of just buying min spec disks to be there yes but contained…
Interesting Input - i am not an Engineer and in the Cerny talk the I/O system Diagrams did not reflect what you wrote here . But what you described makes sense. Good to now !
I feel like this bares repeating again since OP is very concerned. So lets dispel some myths.

1. Sony never said anywhere that you need a significantly faster SSD to match the performance of PS5 internal SSD. What Mark Cerny said was


The SSD you put into the expansion port has to be at least 5.5GB/s so games that push the internal SSD will also work flawlessly with the expansion SSD.

The expansion SSD needs a little extra speed to compensate for 2 priority levels vs 6 in internal SSD. What they are talking about here is the prioritization of IO requests. A game says I need data A,B,C, 1, 2, 3 in this order. The IO grabs those file in the specific order the game needs it, the high priority files gets put in the higher priority lane and the lower priority file go to the lower priority lane. You do not need 7GB/s to compensate for only have 2 true priority lanes, ti doesn't work that way. Just being slightly faster means the IO request gets fulfilled faster. 6 levels of prioritization just gives finer control of how IO requests are fulfilled. Like Mark Cerny said, if you shoot someone and they need to say a particular dialog, that audio file can be put in the higher priority level to be fulfilled first. That is all it is.

aWjiSUm.png


Seriously a 5.5GB/s SSD will work just as well as the internal SSD. A 5GB/s SSD will work just as well, maybe a couple percentage slower at fulfilling the IO requisition. A 4GB/s SSD will be maybe 15% slower. That is a difference of loading something in 2 seconds vs 1.5 seconds. You won't notice the difference unless you put it side by side. OP you can sleep easy.
Thx for that detailed answer! Neogaf is good Place.
Happy Birthday Reaction GIF



So good to now that a 5.5Gb Storage is not going to hinder future PS5 Games Development but since Cerny recommended the WD sn850 i will pull the trigger on a 1TB version of that.

Okay i guess it is settled then - i was wrong. And iam happy about that
settle down mean girls GIF
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Interesting Input - i am not an Engineer and in the Cerny talk the I/O system Diagrams did not reflect what you wrote here . But what you described makes sense. Good to now !
SRAM cache in the I/O Unit (part of the main SoC)
Hg0arMQ.png


DRAM module and SSD Controller (high performance PC SSD’s do have a DRAM cache not to wear the SSD too much and lower latency and increase theoughput):
55QSgsk.jpg


EQCHSoB.jpg
 
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01011001

Banned
Wonder how the MP400 8TB M.2 will do in the PS5. :lollipop_grinning:

maxresdefault.jpg

it needs to be gen4,

to really test how low you can go you would need to use an SSD that benchmarked really terribly, because the read speeds on the packaging is bullshit in most real world scenarios, I posted this in another post, but that 7 GiB/s SSD that Cerny bought for his PS5 usually reads at a speed of about 4.5 GiB/s in a benchmark.
so one would need an SSD that simply performs like absolute ass in benchmark tests for read speeds, and then test games with it.
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
There was never an advantage to begin with, no magic, no secret sauce, just marketing and fantasies. But that house of cards has been falling down for some time already with all the loading times comparisons, where on PS5 there were suppose to be none, instantaneous, maybe 1s long in worst case scenario, while the reality couldn't be any more different. But that still didn't stop people from believing that PS5 SSD will outperform and RTX GPU.
I dont necessarily buy that. I think the PS5 I/O is still the real deal. We have seen it in action in Ratchet. We have seen the 1 or sub 1 second load times in Ratchet, Returnal, Demon Souls, Astro, and even third party games like Resident Evil village. The BC games or straight ports of last gen games yes, they are showing bad loading times but that doesnt mean much when we have 5 next gen games already showing 1 second load times. We have seen that Spiderman traversal demo in action showing game data being streamed at insanely fast speeds.

We also have devs who have gone on record saying that SSDs are essential to faster traversal which confirms what the Spiderman SSD demo was showing.

Flying
Much of Frontiers of Pandora's reveal trailer takes place with Na'vi heroes riding their Banshee companions. As it turns out, this isn't just for show – the game will let you take to the skies and travel across them at high speed, and only new hardware allowed the team to couple that mechanic with the detailed world it wanted to present. "[New consoles allowed] us to have much better object detail up close to you," explains Stefanove, "but also when you're flying high up in the air – to have a lovely vista and far-distance rendering, where we can even use the ray tracing to do shadows super far away, you know, three or four kilometers away from you."

It's not just that the world needs to look good as you lazily soar over it – it's that it needs to stay looking good while you travel very, very quickly, as Jansén explains: "You're flying at enormous high speeds on a Banshee over this very, very detailed landscape. It doesn't matter how much we can render, unless we can stream it in as fast when we're moving very fast from one place to another. So just this shift to these newer hard drives, it can't be underestimated because, and it really has a lot of implications."

Map Design

One of the less visible benefits of new hardware is in changing not just how the open world looks, but how it's pieced together. Because of more limited tech, older open world games needed to balance detail with density, which can lead to large areas of relative nothingness between major points of interest (I'm looking at you Assassin's Creed: Odyssey). It seems that new-gen tech will allow Frontiers of Pandora to be built a little more organically:

"It's not just the old 'I'm taking this slow walk as I enter into the place because we have to stream everything in'," explains Jansén of the benefits to his maps, "it's little subtle things that people don't think about, which is how close together are all the places in the world. If you look at, with the old hard drives, they had to be spaced out very far [apart], because you had to stream out the old and stream in the new, so it just created a formulaic world. So, there's a ton of stuff like that."

So clearly the SSD is important for several different things. I agree that the GPU still needs to be able to render all the detail the SSD will push out, and I am sure I said that in the next gen threads several times, but tech specs are tech specs and you just cant discount bandwidth advantages in vram or in SSD just like how you cant dismiss tflops advantages. I used to say tflops are tflops. It's how PC cards in the same family are measured. It's how consoles were measured all last gen. They are the best indicator of performance and we are now seeing that in action. The same will be true of SSD. That is, IF the damn first party studios take full advantage of all 5.5 GBps of it.
 

01011001

Banned
We have seen it in action in Ratchet. We have seen the 1 or sub 1 second load times in Ratchet, Returnal, Demon Souls, Astro, and even third party games like Resident Evil village.

none of these load faster than 1 second. Ratchet loads in about 2 seconds up to 3 seconds (depending on scene), Demon's Souls loads way longer than 1 second (just started it and it takes at least 3-4 seconds to load from one place to the next excluding the Nexus of course, which loads very fast), same with Astrobot and Resident Evil 8. 2 seconds is the fastest I've seen so far, and it's the exception so far not the rule.

and it is to be expected honestly given the speed improvements on the SSD and the graphical fidelity of these early games. the jump in terms of texture resolution and the available RAM from last gen to current gen is not that big, the storage speed improvements are gigantic though.
it's not so much that these new consoles load ridiculously fast, it's more like that storage speed finally caught up to the graphics fidelity.
the jump from PS360 to Xbox One/PS4 in terms of RAM was 512MB to 8GB, we are talking a 16x increase here. the jump from Xbox One X to PS5/SX is only 12GB vs. 16GB so 1.3x ... and from PS4/One S to PS5/SX it's 8GB vs 16 GB, a 2x increase

now let's look at the advertised speeds of the HDD inside the PS4, that one is about 125MiB/s
meanwhile the advertised speeds of the SSD inside the PS5 is, as we know, 5.5GiB/s
this means we are looking at a theoretical speed increase of 44x

~2x increase in RAM capacity vs. ~44x increase in theoretical max storage speed


the HDD speeds of the PS4 and Xbox One simply could not hold up with the graphics pushed by developers. what happens when you tailor your graphics to the storage speed or have storage speed be in line with fidelity is clearly seen in many games by Nintendo. they managed to have 2 second load times in many of their games that loaded from a freaking bluray, which are notoriously slow (we are talking in maybe 20 MiB/s)
 
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Snake29

RSI Employee of the Year
The infamous Next-Gen Speculations thread is this way -->


Maybe it's you who has selective memory, but luckily for you all the BS that spawned after Road to PS5 presentation is still there within that thread, along with ~200 or so dedicated threads about the so-called "Game Changing Paradigm Shift™".

And no, the SSD and it's I/O won't increase the console's graphics quality, because it doesn't matter if the assets take 100MB, 1GB or 10GB if the GPU can't make a picture out of them within targeted frametime.

The PS5 SSD is nothing but equivalent of The Power Of The Cloud™, where some people desperately wanted to believe their beloved plastic box is better than the other one, but we all know well how it ended up last time, and this time won't be any different.

Get Out Episode 3 GIF by RuPaul's Drag Race
 
Here's what happens if you install a slower SSD:

IMG_1307.jpg


I guess what happened is they allowed slower drives, with the caveat that in the future games may require the full performance of installing it to the internal drive if you opt for a slower drive than the old recommendation.
ah Yeah so that will be the kingsway anyway. That way they can technicly allow a bit slower drives but cannot be blamed if performance suffers. And offer a solution to the Customer (by installing on the main SSD) . So Devs realy should not be affected by this. They anyway will a im high in regards of SSD SPecs. Perfection.gif
 

John Wick

Member
The infamous Next-Gen Speculations thread is this way -->


Maybe it's you who has selective memory, but luckily for you all the BS that spawned after Road to PS5 presentation is still there within that thread, along with ~200 or so dedicated threads about the so-called "Game Changing Paradigm Shift™".

And no, the SSD and it's I/O won't increase the console's graphics quality, because it doesn't matter if the assets take 100MB, 1GB or 10GB if the GPU can't make a picture out of them within targeted frametime.

The PS5 SSD is nothing but equivalent of The Power Of The Cloud™, where some people desperately wanted to believe their beloved plastic box is better than the other one, but we all know well how it ended up last time, and this time won't be any different.
"Game Changing Paradigm Shift™".
Unreal Engine 5 demonstrated that there is a Paradigm shift in the way games will be made with SSD as base storage.
"And no, the SSD and it's I/O won't increase the console's graphics quality, because it doesn't matter if the assets take 100MB, 1GB or 10GB if the GPU can't make a picture out of them within targeted frametime"
The graphics quality will increase because the system no longer needs to load in the next 30 seconds or so of the gameplay into memory. Because the SSD and IO are quick enough to get the data so only maybe the next few seconds needs to be in memory. Thats more ram to play with etc.
The power of the cloud was a joke but the benefits of the PS5 SSD and IO are real and tangible. We're still in early on this gen with cross-gen still a thing. Lets give the devs some time because thats all we used to hear about the SX for the past year.
 
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