I'm really curious to see how our current extended HDD's are handled for next-gen systems. Seems like the pipe will definitely be too slow to play games off of them, but what's the solution?
Will Sony and Microsoft let us still use external drives just for backup, with the ability to move games between external and internal as we want to play them? That makes the most sense to me, as I know plenty of people who have 2TB and up external drives right now.
I just have to wonder how long said transfer will take on a game by game basis.
Using it for backups sounds like a cool idea, but I also wonder if external drives will be used for PS4 games? Since PS4 games were built around the constraints of slower storage devices and this would make it easier for people to migrate their game library from the PS4 to the PS5.
We still need to have this SSD stuff cleared up though, such as how it works.
I wonder if the PS5's storage could be expanded with compatible drives and if these compatible SSDs will be proprietary, and if not, what exactly would be a compatible drive? And what kind of interface will they be using?
If it's utilizing an NVME interface, maybe there could be two slots in the machine, one for the original drive and a second one for those that want to add another.
From the patent it sounds like the PS5 may have some-kind of decompression cores that will handle the decompression of data, this is something which is usually handled on the CPU.
From my research regarding the loading speed of games, it appears that this process has now become predominantly CPU-bound, as even NVME SSDs have seen minimal to no improvements in the loading speed of games compared to SATA drives. Some games primarily rely on single-threaded performance to load games, and may not take advantage of the multiple cores available in this loading process due to this.
On the software side, I can foresee developments in this area, where games will take better advantage of the available cores during the loading process.
On the hardware side, I wonder if these decompression cores are embedded on the SSD itself, or if they are separate. If they are the latter, perhaps these improved decompression speeds could benefit other drives as well, this could be beneficial as Sony wouldn't need to have proprietary drives, but there could be more to these drives as mentioned in the patent than just their decompression cores.
I know the answer will probably be "none", but what are the chances these things will get SSD's bigger than 1TB? Seeing games already ballooning past 100GB on current-gen consoles I can only imagine how insanely big next-gen games will be in terms of file size, and with a 1TB SDD I'm fearing we'll be able to install 5-6 games before it's full.
I believe it will be 2TB, but most will say 1TB
I hope it will be 2TB. Some games are getting absolutely huge these days! I know this is different but Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC requires 150GB.
Cerny said there are a lot of duplicate data ATM, so maybe it won't increased that much.
The real question is how many different AAA or AAAA games you play regulary in a month ?
Data duplication is definitely something to be considered!