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[RCU005]

I think it's great that Sony is allowing for any third party SSD brand to work on PS5. However, since the PS5 architecture is unique, Sony will have to approve each one to guarantee support.

Microsoft is selling their own custom 1 TB memory cards (that I think it's a great idea, since they work exactly as the internal SSD), but Sony is for the meantime making us wait. So why not sell the same exact drive inside the PS5 from launch?

I don't know how much either the SSD or MS's memory card will cost, but regarding Sony if they know that SSD will work, sell it separately, and have it as an option until more SSD drives become available!

What do you think? Will they announce they will sell their SSD drive, or just rely on third party brands?

 

[Jimmyisback]

I don't think Sony drives are proprietary. They will list future drives as whether they are compatible or not.

 

[FranXico]

They might well make an arrangement with a supplier to sell their own upgrades. We'll see.

 

[JareBear: Remastered]

I could see them selling their own as a stand-alone item eventually, to go along with third party options that fit the PS5’s spec requirements

 

[LordKasual]

Doubt it, something similar will come along from 3 different manufacturers until its basically standard most like.

The future paradigm of games depends on it.

 

[Keihart]

BTW, let's not forget that they'll support external HDDs too, so if your concern it's downloading games, you might as well wait to know wich sizes are supported and get a huge HDD to archive games and copy them to the SSD only when you play them.

Edit: i wonder if we can patch archived games, that would be ideal to keep them up to date.

 

[Gamerguy84]

Isnt it more the controller? You drop in an NVMe and Sonys Sonys controller and lanes take over?

 

[Slings and Arrows]

Doubt it, something similar will come along from 3 different manufacturers until its basically standard most like.

The future paradigm of games depends on it.

This is such an interesting point.

Are we looking at vhs/beta max, hdd/blu Ray kind of 'war', where both companies are trying to set a new standard?

 

[sobaka770]

As a hardware company I think it'd be good for them to have Sony-PS5 branded own drives. Then again I do not know who produces current drives (might be some cooperation with Samsung or other manufacturer) so we'll have to wait and see,

But marketing and money-wise, having own drives like XboX Series X sounds like a good idea.

 

[Knitted Knight]

If they were smart they should.

 

[JareBear: Remastered]

BTW, let's not forget that they'll support external HDDs too, so if your concern it's downloading games, you might as well wait to know wich sizes are supported and get a huge HDD to archive games and copy them to the SSD only when you play them.

Edit: i wonder if we can patch archived games, that would be ideal to keep them up to date.

Transferring games between external and internal storage on PS4 (I assume XBO too but I can’t test) can be a little time consuming for larger titles, I’m looking forward to seeing a big improvement on this front with the PS5 and XsX.

I’m planning on using a 2TB SATA SSD externally for my PS5, quick swapping should be pretty painless

 

[ABnormal]

It is not really the ssd that makes the difference. It's the I/O architecture and the data processors.

 

[Keihart]

Transferring games between external and internal storage on PS4 (I assume XBO too but I can’t test) can be a little time consuming for larger titles, I’m looking forward to seeing a big improvement on this front with the PS5 and XsX.

I’m planning on using a 2TB SATA SSD externally for my PS5, quick swapping should be pretty painless

yeah, i don't think it's going to be slow like that. In PS4 when installing a game, it takes forever because the console tries to copy the info in a certain order. It literally tries to copy the info physically close to make read times faster. This doesn't even matter in flash memory. It's like installing linux or defraggin HDD in windows if you recall that lol.

 

[LordKasual]

This is such an interesting point.

Are we looking at vhs/beta max, hdd/blu Ray kind of 'war', where both companies are trying to set a new standard?

I honestly don't know, because it's less the harddrive itself and more the architecture of the system that leverages the harddrive. I don't know how that's gonna get copied, but i know something similar will definitely start showing up.

Perhaps the PC equivalent will match/exceed these speeds by completely different means and render it unnecessary.

 

[Armorian]

MS approach is great, they can ensure all storage has same performance for games. Sony fucked up, plus changing HDD in PS3/PS4 is pain in the ass, this time it will probably be even worse.

 

[vivftp]

I fully expect that Sony will also sell their own drives for the PS5 which are basically the PS5 drive repackaged externally. It'll be incredibly popular for them to have officially branded PS5 storage being sold for the laymen, and will be amazing to have third party drives people can purchase on the open market for those who want to seek a deal and shop around. That'd absolutely win-win.

 

[MeatSafeMurderer]

BTW, let's not forget that they'll support external HDDs too, so if your concern it's downloading games, you might as well wait to know wich sizes are supported and get a huge HDD to archive games and copy them to the SSD only when you play them.

Sounds like a terrible idea to be frank. SSDs have a fundamentally limited write endurance in a way HDDs just don't. Constantly copying games to and fro in an attempt to get around the size limitation is going to kill the SSD fairly quickly.

 

[Rentahamster]

They sold memory sticks for insane markups, so I have no reason to think they wouldn't do the same strategy here.

 

[onQ123]

I'm pretty sure that the SSD that Sony has in PS5 isn't removable & the reason that it's so fast is because of it's connection.


Any SSD that Sony sell wouldn't have the same benefit as the SSD made into the console but it will benefit from the co-processors

 

[RaySoft]

I could see them selling their own as a stand-alone item eventually, to go along with third party options that fit the PS5’s spec requirements

The nands are probably soldered straight onto the mobo. Why would they make m2 pcbs when it´s not needed? It´s not an off-the-shelf product.
If they wanted they could ofc make their own and sell it as an expansion alternative, but that’s a costly endeavour if youre not already in that line of business.

 

[darkinstinct]

They sold memory sticks for insane markups, so I have no reason to think they wouldn't do the same strategy here.

For starters it's not their tech. They put Samsung SSDs in the PS5. So there is the reason why they won't sell the SSD themselves, it's stupid. Buy from Samsung and you pay their profit margin plus cost. Buy from Sony and you pay Samsung's profit margin and cost plus Sony's profit margin and cost.

 

[phil_t98]

Can’t see any drive that goes in ps5 being cheap for a few years. As people
Have pointed out the tech isn’t even out in PC’s yet so they will be top price for a good while

 

[RaySoft]

I'm pretty sure that the SSD that Sony has in PS5 isn't removable & the reason that it's so fast is because of it's connection.


Any SSD that Sony sell wouldn't have the same benefit as the SSD made into the console but it will benefit from the co-processors

This dont make any sense.. you could just as easily make a connection port for it instead of soldering it to the pcb, but that increases cost.

 

[RaySoft]

For starters it's not their tech. They put Samsung SSDs in the PS5. So there is the reason why they won't sell the SSD themselves, it's stupid. Buy from Samsung and you pay their profit margin plus cost. Buy from Sony and you pay Samsung's profit margin and cost plus Sony's profit margin and cost.

What? Samsung tech? We dont know the makers of the nands, but even if they were samsungs, you cant call Sonys storage solution for Samsung tech. The nands are trivial parts.. It’s the backbone parts of it thats special (custom hardware i/o blocks on the APU) and that’s Sonys patents, not Sammys

 

[RaySoft]

If they were smart they should.

profit vs cost... Does Sony have their own manufacturing plants for ssd’s for instance? Cost/risk would be much greater than the potential profit. Its better to leave that for companies that specializes in making them to provide it.

 

[ethomaz]

When PS5 launches the SSDs compatible with it will be available already.

BTW it will use standard M.2 NVMe drives that matches the minimum speeds.

 

[Keihart]

Sounds like a terrible idea to be frank. SSDs have a fundamentally limited write endurance in a way HDDs just don't. Constantly copying games to and fro in an attempt to get around the size limitation is going to kill the SSD fairly quickly.

have you look up the actual numbers of I/O for modern SSDs?
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They’re all dead

The first lesson came quickly. All of the drives surpassed their official endurance specifications by writing hundreds of terabytes without issue. Delivering on the manufacturer-guaranteed write tolerance wouldn’t normally be cause for celebration, but the scale makes this achievement important. Most PC users, myself included, write no more than a few terabytes per year. Even 100TB is far more endurance than the typical consumer needs.

This is like not using an OLED to play games because burn in, you really have to push it and have a bad one to be affected.

Edit:

Over the past 18 months, we’ve watched modern SSDs easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need. Errors didn’t strike the Samsung 840 Series until after 300TB of writes, and it took over 700TB to induce the first failures. The fact that the 840 Pro exceeded 2.4PB is nothing short of amazing, even if that achievement is also kind of academic.

 

[Keihart]

I'm pretty sure that the SSD that Sony has in PS5 isn't removable & the reason that it's so fast is because of it's connection.


Any SSD that Sony sell wouldn't have the same benefit as the SSD made into the console but it will benefit from the co-processors

It's just the controller part, the part where the 6 priorities of the 12 channels are. That's why they are going to select SSDs that are faster than the original and that can perform at least better than that in their tests.

 

[RaySoft]

I don't think Sony drives are proprietary. They will list future drives as whether they are compatible or not.

Because the std. M2 drives that you can buy in stores dont have the same featureset that the PS5 requires, so the m2 expansion has to compensate by being even faster than the internal one. The reason being It‘s losing perf in the crosstalk with ps5’s logic, Cerny already mentioned this.

 

[alabtrosMyster]

yeah, i don't think it's going to be slow like that. In PS4 when installing a game, it takes forever because the console tries to copy the info in a certain order. It literally tries to copy the info physically close to make read times faster. This doesn't even matter in flash memory.

Have you ever tried to copy a folder with tons of very small files from an SSD to another? it makes a difference.

 

[Keihart]

Have you ever tried to copy a folder with tons of very small files from an SSD to another? it makes a difference.

i mean, yeah, of course. I assume that if it's going to allow for archive then it should not be an install folder but more like an installer compressed file. I might be wrong, but it's what makes sense.

 

[MeatSafeMurderer]

have you look up the actual numbers of I/O for modern SSDs?
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They’re all dead


This is like not using an OLED to play games because burn in, you really have to push it and have a bad one to be affected.

Edit:

All but one of those are MLC drives, with the remainder, and worst performer, being a TLC drive. In case you don't know write endurance gets worse, not better, as you add more levels to the cells...and QLC is not uncommon now, with even a couple of PLC drives on the market. You're not getting MLC NAND in the PS5, it's just too expensive and these days is relegated to prosumer SSDs aimed at content creators, businesses, etc.

 

[Rentahamster]

For starters it's not their tech. They put Samsung SSDs in the PS5. So there is the reason why they won't sell the SSD themselves, it's stupid. Buy from Samsung and you pay their profit margin plus cost. Buy from Sony and you pay Samsung's profit margin and cost plus Sony's profit margin and cost.

They can still market it and make profit on it as a first party approved solution.

Where are you getting that it's definitely Samsung SSDs?

 

[onQ123]

This dont make any sense.. you could just as easily make a connection port for it instead of soldering it to the pcb, but that increases cost.

The connection to the custom controller in the PS5 SSD is different from the connection in standard M.2 SSDs , I don't think Sony will make it easy for people to remove the standard PS5 SSD & replace it with M.2 SSDs I would guess that it would be built in like the Xbox Series X SSD but will have a M.2 drive for adding extra storage.

But if it is removable other companies should also be able to use controllers with 6 levels of priority instead of just 2.

 

[Keihart]

All but one of those are MLC drives, with the remainder, and worst performer, being a TLC drive. In case you don't know write endurance gets worse, not better, as you add more levels to the cells...and QLC is not uncommon now, with even a couple of PLC drives on the market. You're not getting MLC NAND in the PS5, it's just too expensive and these days is relegated to prosumer SSDs aimed at content creators, businesses, etc.

Isn't single cell the fastest and PS5's drive should be around the fastest ones? Would they be using QLC at those speeds? i would expect at least MLC or maybe QLC with lots of cache? but that sounds iffy with the 5.5 GB/s.
Either way, i've read that even in QLC you have huge amounts of write life, in the Peta bytes.

 

[leo-j]

825 GB is not it.
Native 4K games on 100GB UHD Blu-ray disks...... let me tell you, plus patches? Good luck having more than 5-6 games on that SDD.

 

[The Fuzz damn you!]

But if it is removable other companies should also be able to use controllers with 6 levels of priority instead of just 2.

Even if it's not removable, the M2 expansion bay connects to the same I/O controller and so should (in theory) be able to make use of those same priority levels with <7GB/s speeds. I guess it depends on what other magic is in that custom flash controller.

 

[MeatSafeMurderer]

Isn't single cell the fastest and PS5's drive should be around the fastest ones? Would they be using QLC at those speeds? i would expect at least MLC or maybe QLC with lots of cache? but that sounds iffy with the 5.5 GB/s.
Either way, i've read that even in QLC you have huge amounts of write life, in the Peta bytes.

SLC is the fastest...and the most reliable...small problem though...nobody manufactures SLC NAND based SSDs anymore...nobody...like at all. You can't even buy them in the enterprise space. It's just too prohibitively expensive. Same reason MLC is so expensive, yields and fundamental size limits. The more levels you add to the cells the easier it is to get large capacities (at the cost of speed and write endurance). You'll be lucky to end up with TLC in the PS5.

Also...you can't just define write endurance like that, since write life is dependent on two things...the cells...and capacity. A 1TB SSD has double the write endurance of an otherwise comparable 512GB SSD. I'm sure you could see how that could appear to work in QLC's favor, since larger capacities are easier to achieve...until you realise that the PS5's SSD isn't particularly large and you're still making sacrifices in terms of the actual endurance of each individual cell.

 

[RCU005]

The connection to the custom controller in the PS5 SSD is different from the connection in standard M.2 SSDs , I don't think Sony will make it easy for people to remove the standard PS5 SSD & replace it with M.2 SSDs I would guess that it would be built in like the Xbox Series X SSD but will have a M.2 drive for adding extra storage.

But if it is removable other companies should also be able to use controllers with 6 levels of priority instead of just 2.

We still don’t know if the SSD inside the PS5 is removable or if the M2 port will be separate. If it’s the former, then there is no reason for Sony to not sell those same exact SSD separately so you can replace them.

On the other hand, if it’s the latter and there’s another bay that you put the M2 SSD, then Sony should partner with someone (Samsung, Seagate, or whatnot) to sell a PS5 branded drive that is guaranteed to work flawlessly on PS5.

I will still have a standard HDD to have all the games stored because I want to k ow I have them in case they got deleted from the Store by any reason (like what happened to PT demo and few games).

I think that Sony’s approach seems confusing right now, and hopefully they will clarify more things once they unveil the console design, and (hopefully) do a breakdown of it.

 

[Dr.brain64]

ps5 is made to make use of the highest ssd speed available, which are the expensive ones on the market. Others will work too but not as fast.

 

[banjo5150]

If I was a SSD manufacturer I would be reaching out to Sony like yesterday on what is needed to work perfect for PS5. Come in at a good cost and sell a million of them!

 

[DarkMage619]

Is the drive in PS5 removable like the PS4 and PS3? If the SSD isn't the issue but the IO you should be able to install any fast SSD and use the PS5 IO to take it to the next level. I still think that MS has the better solution because you know that the drive they sell will work 100% with no guesswork or research beforehand. The capacity of the PS5 drive is also interesting. Are we certain that it isn't proprietary?

 

[killatopak]

MS approach is great, they can ensure all storage has same performance for games. Sony fucked up, plus changing HDD in PS3/PS4 is pain in the ass, this time it will probably be even worse.

????
I dunno about changing the PS3 but changing the PS4 HDD is easy. It’s basically plug and play.

 

[Gravemind]

They'd better have some sort of relatively affordable solution because 825 gb of storage is pretty underwhelming to have to have right out of the gate.

I'm not even really pumped about 1TB drives, but we're dealing with consoles here so we should be realistic.

 

[DarkMage619]

????
I dunno about changing the PS3 but changing the PS4 HDD is easy. It’s basically plug and play.

You think it will be easier than buying a memory card and plugging it in the back of the console?

 

[longdi]

Sony should do a bigger 1.6tb version but the press may jumped at the price tag.

In Mark Sony speech, there seems a lot of wip in how expanding PS5 storage goes, need to manage your games, need to wait for faster drives, need to validate current drives, need to have certain heatsink height, need to retest games on new drive, more details 'some time after' PS5 launch.

In this area, MS memory card is easily better for richer gamers to keep their games on disk

Btw these are the 5gbs pcie4 ssd available today...look at those heatsink, by years' end, even faster 7gbs ssd, who knows the heat sink needed..

 

[Armorian]

????
I dunno about changing the PS3 but changing the PS4 HDD is easy. It’s basically plug and play.

Changing drive itself yeah, but you also need a firmware on a USB stick, way more steps than needed (all of FW files should be on flash).

 

[Dark Rider]

I think third party manufacturers will have razor sharp profit margins so I don't think Sony will offer their own brand because it's not worth it.

 

[darkinstinct]

They can still market it and make profit on it as a first party approved solution.

Where are you getting that it's definitely Samsung SSDs?

PS5 could use a Samsung SSD to help games load faster

South Korean tech firm discuss its next generation of SSD tech

www.gamesradar.com

And we know it is not Xbox, because they use Seagate. So Samsung is in PS5.

 

[Oddvintagechap]

Sony will probably sell a 2TB version for 100-200$ more.
I would advise Sony to sell 20% 800Gb PS5s for 449-500$. And 80% 2TB PS5 for 600-649$.
When people try to sell buy all the 500$ Models and sell them for 649$ people will simply buy the 2TB version.