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PS5 SSD Expandable Storage Likely Confirmed (New Info Added to Existing Patent)
- Thread starter DriftingSpirit
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A week ago everyone assumed you would have to swap the drive for bigger sizes. So I dont see how add on storage can be bad news even if it is propriety.
Welcome to Era. This board is famous for jumping to conclusions and overreactions. None of us know what this thing is, whether it will actually be used on PS5 or how much it will cost but some in here are already predicting doom and gloom. How difficult is it to wait till Sony actually reveals the PS5? All of this could be be something else not related to the PS5 at all, the console is a full year away at least. But no, arrogant Sony has returned and the PS5 is doomed to repeat the failures of the Vita even though both systems are nothing alike and separated by almost a decade.
I think it's quite probable based on what MS said at E3. They also led the tech talk with the ssd front and center and said 'We have created a next generation of SSD' - that sounds like custom hardware.
Richard Leadbetter has said that from what he had heard MS's solution is also 'bespoke', and not to expect upgradeability with standard parts on either console. (https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.eurogamer.net/amp/digitalfoundry-2019-project-scarlett-spec-analysis)
You know, maybe - maybe - there's good technical motivations for doing things this way, maybe there's an opportunity to go further than open compatibility would allow.
Not sure why the OP thinks they will use SATA connection for the SSD. They'll obviously use a PCIe 4.0 M.2 variant for that juicy bandwidth.
Does the pin layout there not suggest a custom IO interface?
I suppose this could just be an adaptor to another interface somewhere else, but I'd guess the pins in the diagram slot directly into the motherboard and then over a bus to the apu.
They will not use SATA, too bad performance. PCIe 4.0 all the way.
If they want to give developers a guarantee of X GB/s transfer speed, they must also control the expanded storage options to be able to maintain that speed. Makes perfect sense to me and it's for our benefit.
Hence my use of the word "variant". Since it's proprietary, they might shuffle the pin layout a bit I guess to avoid people hacking some own M.2 cards that cannot maintain the bandwidth they guarantee for developers, so they are likely forced to change the pin layout compared to standard M.2 slots.
Edit: On a typical X570-based motherboard, the M.2 slot closest to the CPU is driven by the PCIe 4.0 channels reserved for the CPU, while additional M.2 slots are driven from the X570 chipset directly. Performance should be similar, but it will be interesting to see how many PCIe 4.0 channels Sony end up using for the whole system. They will certainly not need as many channels as there is on a normal X570 motherboard, making the APU's IO chip smaller.
It looks like more than a shuffle though - it's completely different, different number of pins also.
Now maybe inside there's a m2 nVMe interface and this interface visible in the diagram is just an adaptor... otherwise though, it seems it might be totally different?
Can't stop progress. Let's see what gives instead of ringing the panic alarm.
You are way oversimplifying this. It's not just about load times. Every game you have played to date has been designed around HDD load speeds, and SSD is just a bonus for loadtimes.
Next-gen games are going to be designed to stream assets at the speed of the built-in SSD. There is no HDD option, there isn't even 'slightly slower SSD' option. The more you think about this, proprietary is likely the only path.
I would hope that whatever Custom Internal SSD these consoles have will allocate a portion which has to be empty at all times so that it can pull across data from any old external drive which will require a five or 10 minute read/process aka current gen install times to keep costs down. I can see this being a Kinect situation if the costs are prohibitive and one of MS and Sony offer an a less than elegant alternative.
They don't need all the pins kept for backwards compatibility, so they can remove a lot of the extra crud on a typical NVMe M.2 connector. They also don't need to include the pins that are not used but kept for future expandability. For PCIe 4.0 alone, they should get by with 5 pins per four PCIe lanes. I didn't look at the patent, did it have a pin layout?
i would assume this would be an option to expand in-built storage, rather than a replacement for external storage? if i can still store games externally on a HDD and swap the data out as i need them onto the in-built, included SSD, i'm happy doing that rather than spending god knows what sticking in proprietary "memory cards".
I smell a Xbox 360/Vita scenario in proprietary storage all over again.
Don't always assume that people will automatically buy a PS5 because it's Sony or PlayStation.
Remember what had happened with the PS3 & Vita.
Don't always assume that people will automatically buy a PS5 because it's Sony or PlayStation.
Remember what had happened with the PS3 & Vita.
On one hand, Proprietary Format Sony is up there with Arrogant Sony on that "Ah fuck here we go again" scale. On the OTHER hand, endeavors like this and microsoft's are exactly what the industry needs right now for technology to move forward and get the prices down to an acceptable price. The more mass produced and cheaper SSD storage becomes the faster the market can adapt to it and have it as cheap and viable as mechanical HDDs. Outside of the hardcore enthusiant gamers more than 20TB storage is excessive for most consumers, but its gonna be in 10 years as file sizes for everything keeps rising.
Just last week:
Cory Barlog tweeted an "end transmission" tweet.
ERA: OMG, Corg leaving SSM and joining MS to spearhead a Xbox scifi 1st party exclusive!!!!!!
PS4 players are probably more likely to buy PS5 based on the fact they're now "locked" into an ecosystem. with PS+ games and digital purchases you're throwing a lot away if you decide to move to a different machine at this point. especially when all those games will work on your new piece of hardware. and the same is true with MS too. if you've been digital only, or amassed any sort of digital collection or simply value your games with gold "freebies", you are unlikely to switch platform moving into next gen. now add in all the typical stuff on top of that... brand loyalty, brand strength, controller preference, where your friends are, exclusives etc and it just seems less and less likely to happen.
PS5 may not sell as well as the PS4, since PS4 is a bit of a beast...but i definitely think most people who are wanting a new console who own a PS4 will move onto PS5. and regardless of how the xbox fared this gen, i think most people looking for a next gen system who own a xboxone will transition to scarlet.
Assuming the heavily customised storage solution that Sony is preparing, it only makes sense for them to offer something like this. I guess running games from "common" SSDs would be impossible. I still expect them to support external storage for other content though.
If it's built to be faster than anything on the market, then it has to be proprietary.Is that....proprietary storage?!!?
We'll see what will be storage situation for PS5 next year.
Maybe it will be 1-2TB of onboard fast custom storage, or, 128-256GB of fast custom storage plus larger slower drive for "cold storage" [more inconvenient, but cheaper for manufacturing]. These cartriges [if they are indeed for PS5] could be used in both of those setups.
It's not bad, it's the potential price that's worrying.
We all lived through the Vita years. The struggle of using a 16gb card until there was a firesale on the 64gb card.
Why does the price has to be the same if "normal external SSDs" for PCs are [perhaps much] slower?
If users can attach any external HDD to PS5 for use as cold storage, all will be fine IMO.
Didn't know this. Thanks for the info.
This is what I said earlier this year.
The proprietary SSD that Cerny described in the Wired article sounded great, but it also brings with it the disadvantage that it is exactly that: proprietary. So gone are the days of just simply upgrading the drive with your own, or running your games directly off an external drive. You're going to have to spend the big bucks on a proprietary storage upgrade.
Whether it is worth the trade-off depends just how much faster this SSD actually is compared to other high end SSDs available on the market at that time. Don't forget that PCIe 5.0 SSD drives will be a thing by then.
The proprietary SSD that Cerny described in the Wired article sounded great, but it also brings with it the disadvantage that it is exactly that: proprietary. So gone are the days of just simply upgrading the drive with your own, or running your games directly off an external drive. You're going to have to spend the big bucks on a proprietary storage upgrade.
Whether it is worth the trade-off depends just how much faster this SSD actually is compared to other high end SSDs available on the market at that time. Don't forget that PCIe 5.0 SSD drives will be a thing by then.
I really don't know whether bandwidth is a good metric, to be honest. I know that since years the bandwidth was what was marketed but the big benefit is latency. Of course bandwidth is important but if it is 3GB/s or 5GB/s is not the main difference, especially since this is peak bandwidth.
Peak yes, but it's continues bandwidth when reading large continues chunks of data. Combined with a new install storage format for games, this might be wicked fast and significantly faster than the random access speeds typically seen on PC. If they settle for "just" matching max read speeds for PC PCIe 4.0 drives, we're talking 5 GB/s. If they have a custom driver controller and use more lanes combined with a better cooling solution, it might exceed this.
Pretty much this. -IF- this cartridge is expandable SSD-storage fpr PS5; then it is very likely a propietary product because there is no near-future consumer alternative that fits Sony's requirements regarding performance and ease of use.
No, we currently know nothing about the use of external storage with the PS5.
Well, there's 12 'pins'. Looking at m2 cards or PCIe I don't think it aligns with either of those formats.
I'm not sure it's just about bandwidth - I've a feeling it's as much about latency and guaranteed latency as anything else.
To be able to say
'if you put in requests at frame time x, for y bytes of data, it will be in memory at frame time z by the latest and nothing will interrupt that'
For example, that would allow games to reach into storage for data that even rendering depends on, within a single frame or less. To be able to make a guarantee like that would be 'big'. The implications of just-in-time delivery of graphics data could be huge.
Could be wrong, but I get the impression it might be very difficult to make guarantees like that on commodity hardware with arbitrary firmware and address lookup/translation hardware, even if their raw bandwidth is sky high, and higher than what might be in the next consoles.
Sure, you have to organize the data so that it can be accessed in a fast way for an ssd but this is true for even the first ssd's that arrived almost a decade ago. And in the end, you are going to put the data into RAM and even if it is 20GB in size, you have like 4 seconds with 5GB/s or 8 seconds with 2.5GB/s which is not an order of magnitude in difference and an extreme example as no one is going to replace everything in RAM.
I am still excited to see what Sony and Microsoft come up with, though. I am just skeptical when it comes to "huge numbers" dick-size comparing and real world performance.
This has probably already been assumed, but from the jp filings, this image shows the cover removed, and the dotted lines are thus presumably internal components.
I suppose one could assume the large square in the middle is the memory controller, but I'm not sure about extrapolating that the surrounding rectangles are the nand devices - that would suggest either very physically small nand devices, or a fairly large case and pins? I'm not sure how big nand devices actually are... but I didn't think they were that small (i.e. smaller than pins, typically).
It would enable the 'same' problem Insomniac had with Spider-Man: They had to tune their engine-streaming to the lowest common denominator (HDD speed/bandwith).
gave ERA a blank piece of paper and ERA will correlate that piece of paper as the main cause & instigator of the endtimes.
I was talking to my dev-friend yesterday (disclaimer: not PS5 related, altough he did work with PS4), he was just musing but it would be "awesome" if it was possible to direcly load things into memory from storage; bypassing CPU; or even be able to stream data to the GPU directly from storage.
I was wondering how they'd handle expandable storage with the focus on super fast read-speeds.
Pricing will be... interesting, if true.
Pricing will be... interesting, if true.
People calling for the "Wait and see what they're going to do!" approach must have never been in any other thread since the conception of this site. It's never happened before and this thread isn't the special one to get it done. Some is legit worry about pricing, some may be "concern", but it's all par for the course. In an ideal world Sony will have their fast internal drive, an equally fast (and decently priced) optional drive for expanded storage and the ability to use a slow HDD for storing games and transferring them to the internal. And that's my personal expectation except for the price as I have no idea what they're going to do there. I'd be ok with that.
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