Playstation 5 storage says it does 5.5gb/s reads, PCI Gen4 NVME doesn't even hit that, am I reading it wrong?

[Space Lynx]

I checked Crystalmark and a few other things of like the gigabyte Aurus etc. Will this storage really be faster than any NVME drive (currently) on PC?

 

[agent_x007]

Since it's tailor-made, I'd say it's not impossible.

 

[Space Lynx]

Dang if that is true that is very impressive indeed.

 

[R0H1T]

Where are you getting your numbers from, is that a theoretical limit you're talking about? An x8 gen4 drive for instance would easily top that out.

 

[Calmmo]

Watch their PS5 spec video, explains it a bit. They aren't using the worlds fastest memory, it's simply a different configuration.

 

[Filip Georgievski]

Kek, almost every PCIE 4.0 nVME SSD can hit 6Gbps and more, nothing special, but still a great improvement over the PS4's hardware even upgraded with a regular SATA SSD.

 

[Armagg3don]

I don't understand what the surprise is since the 5.5 to 6 Gbps NVMe was already announced months ago for the end of this year.
Maybe with the pandemic they'll be delayed, though.

 

[Caring1]

Sony Reveals PS5 Hardware: RDNA2 Raytracing, 16 GB GDDR6, 6 GB/s SSD, 2304 GPU Cores

Sony in a YouTube stream keynote by PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny, detailed the upcoming entertainment system's hardware. There are three key areas where the company has invested heavily in driving forward the platform by "balancing revolutionary and evolutionary" technologies...

www.techpowerup.com

"Each PlayStation 5 ships with a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 SSD with a flash controller that has been designed in-house by Sony. The controller features 12 flash channels, and is capable of at least 5.5 GB/s transfer speeds. When you factor in the exponential gains in access time, Sony expects the SSD to provide a 100x boost in effective storage sub-system performance, resulting in practically no load times.
The secret sauce here is that Sony is using its own protocol instead of NVMe, in supporting 6 data priority tiers versus 2 on NVMe. "

 

[oxrufiioxo]

I wish they would have put that much enginuiy into the GPU that's quite a bit weaker than the xbox series X when comparing compute units.... Hopefully RDNA 2 scales better with clocks than RDNA 1.

 

[X71200]

I checked Crystalmark and a few other things of like the gigabyte Aurus etc. Will this storage really be faster than any NVME drive (currently) on PC?

No, not at all. 4k read and writes are what matters the most as games and Windows do small file reads a lot more than dealing with single big chunks of files. Optane is the best performing SSD for this and it will outperform the Playstation drive by a good margin. There are other drives out in the market which will also perform better for realistic real world usage, like Samsung Z-Nand, or even V-Nand PCI-E drives, but I'm supposing that controller also performs decently in 4k (the 4.0 SSDs do OK there) which means it will perform decently for what its worth.

 

[las]

Nah. It's just marketing. Seq. read/write does not tell much about SSD speed. Especially not in games (alot of small files - never hits max seq. read speed). Sony probably just state the teoritical max speed (maybe even for the bus and not the controller/drive itself - who knows - probably never will be tested)

It's a huge improvement going from a HDD tho.

Sadly it looks like the drives are proprietary.

Sony's Cartridge Patent May Describe Custom SSD for the PlayStation 5 | Digital Trends

Sony filed a patent in June describing what appeared to be a game cartridge design for an unannounced PlayStation-branded handheld device. Now, there’s speculation that this patent actually describes a custom external SSD for the PlayStation 5 console arriving at the end of 2020.

www.digitaltrends.com

 

[Elysium]

Of the things they could choose to improve over previous console gens, the SSD strikes me as a very back-of-the bus kind of upgrade, mostly because console gamers have been using HDDs since forever and won't really know the difference between a fairly run of the mill SATA SSD and a custom solution. Their advances in aural tech seemed comparatively more interesting.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

No, not at all. 4k read and writes are what matters the most as games and Windows do small file reads a lot more than dealing with single big chunks of files. Optane is the best performing SSD for this and it will outperform the Playstation drive by a good margin. There are other drives out in the market which will also perform better for realistic real world usage, like Samsung Z-Nand, or even V-Nand PCI-E drives, but I'm supposing that controller also performs decently in 4k (the 4.0 SSDs do OK there) which means it will perform decently for what its worth.

The ps5 internal SSD is not pciex4 standard.

It has way more channels than most consumer SSD's, more pliable bandwidth and was made for higher Io at lower que depths on non sequential data, all with three time's the tiering for priority, and hardware acceleration of data compression and decompression.

Pciex4 is no match for it, two might equal it in actual pliable bandwidth but the data compression and decompression cannot be equaled on pc while leaving CPU cores available for a useful load, although I suppose if you're running 16/32 core's you could be fine imho.

At least that's what I took from mark Cerny's presentation.

 

[las]

SSD is revolutionary, for consoles. That is why they spend so much time talking about it. Also, because the remaining specs are not that impressive. Sony skimped on raw CPU/GPU power, compared to Xbox Series X.

Luckily, the games is what sells consoles. If just Sony keeps pumping out good exclusives, they will be fine and PS will probably outsell Xbox again. Afterall PS4 Pro sold much better than X1X, mainly because of exclusives titles. PS5 getting backwards comp. is perfect timing from Sony. If people can keep playing their old PS4 games, many won't even consider the alternative. Afterall PS4 outsold XB1 alot. Like 4:1 or 3:1. Microsoft does not even want to talk about it. They only tells "shipped consoles" not sold consoles. Big big difference.

I have used a 1TB SSD in my PS4 Pro since launch. HDD is cheap but insanely slow as gamedrive. Glad they are waking up now. PS4 Pro and X1X should have been born with SSD if you ask me... They went for size over speed.

 

[bonehead123]

The secret sauce here is that Sony is using its own protocol instead of NVMe, in supporting 6 data priority tiers versus 2 on NVMe

HELLO Sony, this is 1990 calling and we want all our proprietary, one trick pony devices back, like, yesterday !

Secret sauce my a*s.... this is merely a way for Sony to prevent anyone from swapping out their drives for a newer/bigger drive of their choosing....

It would seem that they now regressing into an Apple-like 90's crapfest, making in-house proprietary sh*t that only works in their stuff .. what a dick move.......

 

[ShurikN]

One thing this SSD will also bring is lower storage requirement for games. On HDDs a lot of assets were duplicated as the access times were awful, so in order to not have loading screens every 5 minutes or slow loading textures, or just assets failing to load in time, it was easier for the devs to just copy/paste. It's something that has been going on since the CD days (especially since the cd/dvd drives in consoles werent the fastest things around at the time and ram was fairly small)

 

[Valantar]

Lots of people here pissing on something without doing the necessary research first. While we don't know detailed performance data from this drive, there's little doubt that it will outperform any conventional consumer NAND SSD today. Why?
- 12 NAND channels rather than 4 (cheap drives) or 8 (premium drives), allowing for more parallelism both for sequential and random operations
- custom hardware blocks to handle encryption/decryption and other frequent data juggling tasks, offloading the CPU
- games being made for this storage architecture rather than a generalized one (that needs to work on both HDDs and SSDs), meaning dramatic reductions in duplicate data being spread across the drive for easier access, shrinking file sizes and optimizing for on-the-fly asset streaming (which would be entirely possible on a PC, but would require developers to either require an NVMe drive as a base spec, or make several different installations based on what storage media is used - in other words, this isn't happening)

While this still doesn't reach the limits of PCIe 4.0 x4, and will likely be caught (at least in pure sequential numbers) in the next generation of m.2 SSDs (which is why Sony states that you'll be able to expand storage with a certified drive once they arrive), it's nonetheless faster than anything on the market today.

And don't come dragging Optane, Z-NAND or any of that nonsense - one of those drives half the capacity of the 825GB PS5 SSD will cost you more than the whole PS5, making the entire comparison invalid.

One thing this SSD will also bring is lower storage requirement for games. On HDDs a lot of assets were duplicated as the access times were awful, so in order to not have loading screens every 5 minutes or slow loading textures, or just assets failing to load in time, it was easier for the devs to just copy/paste. It's something that has been going on since the CD days (especially since the cd/dvd drives in consoles werent the fastest things around at the time and ram was fairly small)

Yep, and it's pretty ridiculous how bad it gets. One of the few parts I liked from that terrible Mark Cerny presentation was when he was talking about ... was it trash cans in Spider Man? How there were several thousand copies of that asset in various files in the installation as the seek time of the HDD would otherwise have made the entire game an unplayable stuttery mess every time it needed to fetch that asset (which is in pretty much every part of the game map grid).

HELLO Sony, this is 1990 calling and we want all our proprietary, one trick pony devices back, like, yesterday !

Secret sauce my a*s.... this is merely a way for Sony to prevent anyone from swapping out their drives for a newer/bigger drive of their choosing....

It would seem that they now regressing into an Apple-like 90's crapfest, making in-house proprietary sh*t that only works in their stuff .. what a dick move.......

It's still going to support standard NVMe m.2 drives as expansions, with the CPU and other silicon handling virtualization of the additional priority tiers. Nothing shitty about this whatsoever. To expand the storage, all you'll need is an m.2 drive fast enough. They haven't clarified whether only certified drives will work or not, but the phrasing implied that any fast enough drive should work.

 

[ShurikN]

was it trash cans in Spider Man?

Yep, it was trash cans, as it was NYC and they had like millions of them (ok exaggerating a bit but the point stands).

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

SSD is revolutionary, for consoles. That is why they spend so much time talking about it. Also, because the remaining specs are not that impressive. Sony skimped on raw CPU/GPU power, compared to Xbox Series X.

Luckily, the games is what sells consoles. If just Sony keeps pumping out good exclusives, they will be fine and PS will probably outsell Xbox again. Afterall PS4 Pro sold much better than X1X, mainly because of exclusives titles. PS5 getting backwards comp. is perfect timing from Sony. If people can keep playing their old PS4 games, many won't even consider the alternative. Afterall PS4 outsold XB1 alot. Like 4:1 or 3:1. Microsoft does not even want to talk about it. They only tells "shipped consoles" not sold consoles. Big big difference.

I have used a 1TB SSD in my PS4 Pro since launch. HDD is cheap but insanely slow as gamedrive. Glad they are waking up now. PS4 Pro and X1X should have been born with SSD if you ask me... They went for size over speed.

Same here but the PS4 and pro have lower than sata3 bandwidth so it's not the same as using one on a PC.