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

Blond

Banned
Ok i finally enforced me to write this up. I did not wanted to because it stresses me out to a Level that iam exhausted. Exhausted by the realisation that internaly Sony is seeing PC as a very very big Source of Income and that they will do almost everything to make sure that Ports to PC will be possible easy and fast. Even cripple their own consolewich they spend Millions on to develop..

Ok lets dive in:

Cerny said in his Talk that PS5s internal SSD has 5.5Gb raw speed. And additional 4 priority Levels in comparision to normal Nand Drives. They come with 2. So PS5s SSD can use 6. Just a little later Cerny stated that in order to be on par with PS5s internal SSD the Third Party SSD would need to have some additional Speed to even out the missing 4 Priority Levels. Probably the Kraken Controllers job to synthesize 4 more prio lvls with the additional speed.

So much for that Talk and the Perspective he laid out.

so in Oktober last Year we heard that Western Digital would release the first PS5 certified Third Party SSD with their sn850 here the Article about that :

It was then also no suprise that the sn850 would bring a 7Gb raw Throughput on the table. Very much the overhead that we assumed would be neccessary to make up for missing 4 priority Lvls.

After that came nothing from Sony at all about the Third Party SSDs.. until NOW..

But what we miss here is what has happend within Sony in exactly that timespan inbetween the first report about WDs sn850 and this beta invitation with the infromation that a mere 5.5Gb would miraciously befast enough for PS5...
Off course it is about Sony engagement in PC gaming.
What was heard in that timespan?

Sony released more Exclusives and inofficial info about Uncharted4 and other Exclusives made it to the public. They bought Nixxes and everybody understands this as a move to help their PCPort strategy.

So they rated around summer last year the WD sn850 to be sufficiently fast enough to be on par with PS5s internal SSD.

Then came this big BIIG Intrest for PC Gaming to light.
And all of a sudden 5.5GB is enough to be "on par" with PS5s internal SSD?

The Thing is - 5.5GB will never be fast enough to be on par with the same SSD that has 4 Priority Levels more in its Sleeve.
The Problem here is sadly - while this is true - we never find out how much true it is.

Because:
We know that this SSD in the PS5 was planned to be used as a leverage for 9GB/s realtime datastreaming . First title who datastream in realtime many GB/s was Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. Insomniac tweeded out that they make use of real time datastreaming and that everything you do not see on screen is not in memory. - hence every move of the camera will induce a realtime stream of Data comming of the SSD.

So Ratchet and Clank seemingly work fine with a 5.5GB Third Party SSD like some ealry adopters of the beta Programm and indeed Insomniac themselfs point out . But Ratchet and Clank is far from using PS5 potential with they claimed openly in the DF Interview with John Linneman. They said (paraphrasing here) :,, we found out that our engine needs to be updated to be able to handle so much data at once."

So their Game cannot be a Benchmark for Third Party SSD at all.
Or can it?

If Sony allowes 5.5GB SSDs then no Devs Third Party or Sony Studios alike could make a Game that would need a SSD that needs a raw speed of 7GB/s period
That Train has left.

9Gb/s (up to 22GBs) Throughput of PS5 that Train has left too. I cannot imagine that they did not incorporate the PS5s additional 4 Prio Levels in these Numbers.
So since no further overhead available to the Kraken Controller there is no additional 4 Prio Lvls available for PS5 Exclusives also. Even on the PS5s internal SSD!! This Ghost is out of the Bottle and cannot be put back into it. Since all available Third Party SSD do not have those 6 Prio lvls , Developers now need to all the Time assume that someone puts a 5.5GB raw SSD with 2 prio lvls in his PS5.

PS5 Downgraded - one year after Release . Absolutly amazing!!!



And why????

because their internal projections were as such that PC Gamers will only very slowly adopt 7GB nand Storage and it would be immensly difficult (or outright impossible) to port Games form Sony Studios wich leveraged the full PS5s I/O capabilitys in the development of their respective exclusive Title.

With that of course is the dream over for immensly more detailed worlds wich would need 9GB/s of realtime Datastreaming. I could imagine also that they internaly tested this 5.5Gb/s to be equvivalent to Xbox capabilitys, further reducing PS5 specific Dev Effort..
Because to me a 5.5GB/s SSD with only 2 Prio Levels instead of PS5s internal 6 sounds quite like what the Xbox could dream to achieve with its mere 2.5Gb/s Storage.

I am sure that iam not to far off here in regards of all my assumptions and what sealed the deal here for me were actually the Twitters Actions of Insomniac Fitzgerald and Cerny himself.

First that Fitzgerald wrote this "5.5Gb oh yeah its fine its fine we tested it yada yada" Tin Can. He was pushed on that stage like a Clown on a Pub Stage by someone higher than him to go and write something the more technical PS5 Fans would swallow.

And when Cerny actually gave his recommendation for the "suprise" WD sn850,( remember ? It was rated last year under Sonys "old" Strategy , when PS5 capabilitys weren´t thrown under the bus for some more sells on PC) it was clear that he also is not happy with this decision. Clearly he is not. How could he?

Sony says 5.5GB raw is enough and the system architect recommends a 7Gb/s raw Storage?? Sounds like "civil disobidience" to me.
Hopefully this 5.5GB/s recommendation is pulled / denied/ dismissed so this this wall of text here has no validiy anymore.
I hope i am wrong. But i am not, iam afraid..
 
The more worrying thing is why people need more storage. Games take like 10 minutes to download, if that.
Yes, the default hard drive is manageable, but the problem is consistently reinstalling and deleting games especially with the vast amount of games coming out can get annoying and time consuming really fast. Also not helping that games are getting larger making them take longer to install. Isn’t the latest COD game almost 300 GB’s? That’s almost half your hard drive right there for one game.
 
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thebigmanjosh

Gold Member
Ok i finally enforced me to write this up. I did not wanted to because it stresses me out to a Level that iam exhausted. Exhausted by the realisation that internaly Sony is seeing PC as a very very big Source of Income and that they will do almost everything to make sure that Ports to PC will be possible easy and fast. Even cripple their own consolewich they spend Millions on to develop..

Ok lets dive in:

Cerny said in his Talk that PS5s internal SSD has 5.5Gb raw speed. And additional 4 priority Levels in comparision to normal Nand Drives. They come with 2. So PS5s SSD can use 6. Just a little later Cerny stated that in order to be on par with PS5s internal SSD the Third Party SSD would need to have some additional Speed to even out the missing 4 Priority Levels. Probably the Kraken Controllers job to synthesize 4 more prio lvls with the additional speed.

So much for that Talk and the Perspective he laid out.

so in Oktober last Year we heard that Western Digital would release the first PS5 certified Third Party SSD with their sn850 here the Article about that :

It was then also no suprise that the sn850 would bring a 7Gb raw Throughput on the table. Very much the overhead that we assumed would be neccessary to make up for missing 4 priority Lvls.

After that came nothing from Sony at all about the Third Party SSDs.. until NOW..

But what we miss here is what has happend within Sony in exactly that timespan inbetween the first report about WDs sn850 and this beta invitation with the infromation that a mere 5.5Gb would miraciously befast enough for PS5...
Off course it is about Sony engagement in PC gaming.
What was heard in that timespan?

Sony released more Exclusives and inofficial info about Uncharted4 and other Exclusives made it to the public. They bought Nixxes and everybody understands this as a move to help their PCPort strategy.

So they rated around summer last year the WD sn850 to be sufficiently fast enough to be on par with PS5s internal SSD.

Then came this big BIIG Intrest for PC Gaming to light.
And all of a sudden 5.5GB is enough to be "on par" with PS5s internal SSD?

The Thing is - 5.5GB will never be fast enough to be on par with the same SSD that has 4 Priority Levels more in its Sleeve.
The Problem here is sadly - while this is true - we never find out how much true it is.

Because:
We know that this SSD in the PS5 was planned to be used as a leverage for 9GB/s realtime datastreaming . First title who datastream in realtime many GB/s was Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. Insomniac tweeded out that they make use of real time datastreaming and that everything you do not see on screen is not in memory. - hence every move of the camera will induce a realtime stream of Data comming of the SSD.

So Ratchet and Clank seemingly work fine with a 5.5GB Third Party SSD like some ealry adopters of the beta Programm and indeed Insomniac themselfs point out . But Ratchet and Clank is far from using PS5 potential with they claimed openly in the DF Interview with John Linneman. They said (paraphrasing here) :,, we found out that our engine needs to be updated to be able to handle so much data at once."

So their Game cannot be a Benchmark for Third Party SSD at all.
Or can it?

If Sony allowes 5.5GB SSDs then no Devs Third Party or Sony Studios alike could make a Game that would need a SSD that needs a raw speed of 7GB/s period
That Train has left.

9Gb/s (up to 22GBs) Throughput of PS5 that Train has left too. I cannot imagine that they did not incorporate the PS5s additional 4 Prio Levels in these Numbers.
So since no further overhead available to the Kraken Controller there is no additional 4 Prio Lvls available for PS5 Exclusives also. Even on the PS5s internal SSD!! This Ghost is out of the Bottle and cannot be put back into it. Since all available Third Party SSD do not have those 6 Prio lvls , Developers now need to all the Time assume that someone puts a 5.5GB raw SSD with 2 prio lvls in his PS5.

PS5 Downgraded - one year after Release . Absolutly amazing!!!



And why????

because their internal projections were as such that PC Gamers will only very slowly adopt 7GB nand Storage and it would be immensly difficult (or outright impossible) to port Games form Sony Studios wich leveraged the full PS5s I/O capabilitys in the development of their respective exclusive Title.

With that of course is the dream over for immensly more detailed worlds wich would need 9GB/s of realtime Datastreaming. I could imagine also that they internaly tested this 5.5Gb/s to be equvivalent to Xbox capabilitys, further reducing PS5 specific Dev Effort..
Because to me a 5.5GB/s SSD with only 2 Prio Levels instead of PS5s internal 6 sounds quite like what the Xbox could dream to achieve with its mere 2.5Gb/s Storage.

I am sure that iam not to far off here in regards of all my assumptions and what sealed the deal here for me were actually the Twitters Actions of Insomniac Fitzgerald and Cerny himself.

First that Fitzgerald wrote this "5.5Gb oh yeah its fine its fine we tested it yada yada" Tin Can. He was pushed on that stage like a Clown on a Pub Stage by someone higher than him to go and write something the more technical PS5 Fans would swallow.

And when Cerny actually gave his recommendation for the "suprise" WD sn850,( remember ? It was rated last year under Sonys "old" Strategy , when PS5 capabilitys weren´t thrown under the bus for some more sells on PC) it was clear that he also is not happy with this decision. Clearly he is not. How could he?

Sony says 5.5GB raw is enough and the system architect recommends a 7Gb/s raw Storage?? Sounds like "civil disobidience" to me.
Hopefully this 5.5GB/s recommendation is pulled / denied/ dismissed so this this wall of text here has no validiy anymore.
I hope i am wrong. But i am not, iam afraid..
This is a lot of nothing. 5.5 GB/s raw has always been the spec for PS5, and that figure as the baseline for M.2 shouldn’t surprise anyone.

What you’re forgetting is the IO controller and dedicated decompression taking on the majority of the workload to get up to 7-9-22 GB/s compressed.
 

Kilau

Gold Member
This is a lot of nothing. 5.5 GB/s raw has always been the spec for PS5, and that figure as the baseline for M.2 shouldn’t surprise anyone.

What you’re forgetting is the IO controller and dedicated decompression taking on the majority of the workload to get up to 7-9-22 GB/s compressed.
Yeah that could be, I haven’t looked into it too much but a lot has been said how the controller handles stuff.

Ultimately though, folks should never obsess over what these companies are doing.
 
I've been a huge fan of Sony since PS1 days, I'm not worried. We are going to continue to see some truly wonderful games on the platform, don't sweat it.
 

Shmunter

Member
They aren't made for 3rd party random drives, they are made for the 5.5GB/s one that's in the PS5.
You want developers to guess which drive you are using and work to that?
2 issues.

Sony is recommending 5.5 for beta, not enforcing - so the premise indicates slower may even be acceptable.

Second issue; 5.5 internal is a custom solution for increased parallelism beyond any off the shelf drives. It would beg to reason off-the-shelf NVME drives to requires more grunt to bridge the gap since they do not have as many i/o channels and are therefore bottlenecked. Not speculation, just logic even confirmed by the Cermyster himself.

Now the only thing we can hope for is that the Beta is losey goosy with all this and final outcome will be precise enforcement of drive speeds.
 

sankt-Antonio

:^)--?-<
Maybe they realized 5.5 is enough.
You think Sony, after years of development and a massive cost pressure said yolo and went for a faster ssd then they would need just for fun?
The theorie that Sony’s plans where different while the PS5 was conceived / engineered to now (corona/ post console exclusivity) is sound.

If 5.5 sad are better for their current strategy we will see them used in a slim PS5.
 

Rikkori

Member
Here's what you're missing, and is generally the case when the tech illiterate look at the PS5's SSD speeds and marvel: The sequential speeds (that 7 GB/s) is near meaningless. There's many other aspects of storage and I/O in general, and those ones are the issue, and that's where the progress doesn't really exist between SSDs. So in reality that 7 GB/s SSD vs the 5.5 GB/s or even the 3.5 GB/s SSDs, the difference just can't manifest itself because games are not made around sequential speeds (nor could they be). So in general practice outside of loading textures in & out of vram, or that initial loading period for the game/level, that speed advantage is low.

If you want the more in-depth technical analysis read this:

Also: For PCs it wouldn't matter anyway because we also have RAM, which is orders of magnitude faster than the PS5 SSD, and just more of it anyway, so how fast the PS5 SSD is is really irrelevant for PC ports.
 
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reksveks

Member
You should put as much thought into the bigger picture as you do your whining. Would a game that uses "9GB/s realtime datastreaming" even fit on ~600gb of storage?. I could imagine the thread right now for a Sony game costing $70 and being an hour long.
This is what my man LeviathanGamer2 said ages ago and basically I stopped caring so much. Also apparently Sony first party studio need to fit a working game into the uhd bluray as a standard practice so that provides an additional limitation.
 
A lot of the SSD stuff was kind of done as marketing, even if a lot of it was also technical. People seem to keep thinking Road to PS5 didn't serve in some capacity as an advertisement venture, when it was literally tweeted out to gaming public to join in and watch 🤷‍♂️

Truth is there was so much to the specifics of the SSDs we didn't know (and still don't know) that it was never a smart idea to make absolute conclusions. It is possible that data streaming routines are more scalable than people would like to think, and if so then that still gives rise to the possibility you will get 1P games which maximize the PS5's SSD yet can scale down data load and stream features for slower drives while still being perfectly playable.

So people have to accept one of two realities: either design routines and the associated code for data load & streaming ISN'T very scalable (which, if ports of 1P games to PC are to become more prolific more consistently, means that we should either expect very few if any PS5 1P games to fully leverage the custom storage solution, or that said solution was overly designed if those games end up running just as well on various PC configs with slower drives), or those design routines & associated code IS very scalable (meaning arguments against PC ports of 1P games due to the custom PS5 storage were always flaky and bound to collapse sooner or later).

IMO I have always purposed that such things are scalable, given almost every other part of game design is also scalable, to various degrees of effectiveness and work required. It's just a matter of what possible trade-offs you'd want to make.
 

dwish

Member
I was wondering about this as well. Bit weird they are moving away from the 7gb target. Maybe they saw these drives will be unavailable for some time longer and due to public perception about the internal storage space feel they cannot hold out until then. Or maybe just these new discs have some other property that makes them performant enough.
 

Nezzeroth

Member
Devs were never going to make their games for the PS5's SSD speed specifically anyway (except first party), since their games have to be released on other platforms as well.

What most likely happened is that they found out it worked well enough (to the point where the difference was negligible) and allowed it. Nothing wrong with that.
 
That's accounting for compression, which the expansion SSD will also benefit from.
So without reading the wall of text OP wrote, he/she believes performance will be affected if a 5.5gb SSD is used? As its not as advanced as the PS5 SSD? I would find this very hard to believe to be honest, Sony would take massive criticism if that happened.
 

twilo99

Member
Also: For PCs it wouldn't matter anyway because we also have RAM, which is orders of magnitude faster than the PS5 SSD, and just more of it anyway, so how fast the PS5 SSD is is really irrelevant for PC ports.

Right, but the consoles also have RAM, aren't they using some of it for the same purpose? I am guessing 16GB is just nowhere near enough to go by for video, system, and whatever we are talking about here.
 
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longdi

Banned
Right, but the consoles also have RAM, aren't they using some of it for the same purpose? I am guessing 16GB is just nowhere near enough to go by for video, system, and whatever we are talking about here.

yap 16GB is tiny for this gen, hence there was hoping the SSD helps some.

remember consoles need to do the silly ingame streaming, video captures, player cards and stuffs. Which i can turn all off in Windows. :messenger_smiling_with_eyes:
 

reksveks

Member
Right, but the consoles also have RAM, aren't they using some of it for the same purpose? I am guessing 16GB is just nowhere near enough to go by for video, system, and whatever we are talking about here.
It's why the 'famous' idtech engineer wanted an increase in ram capacity as well. Perfectly valid opinion given his priorities.
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
9Gb/s (up to 22GBs) Throughput of PS5 that Train has left too.
You are mixing the Kraken unit specs with the minimum spec of the SSD in the Beta Testing program… the I/O processor is not even feed from the SSD, but from a hierarchy that has 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” bit 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…
 
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Tripolygon

Banned
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

Here's the catch though, that commercial drive has to be at least as fast as ours, games that rely on the speed of our SSD need to work flawlessly with M.2 drive.
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.
We can hook up a drive with only two priority levels definitely but our custom I/O unit has to arbitrate the extra priorities rather than the M.2 drives flash controller and so the M.2 drive needs a little extra speed to take care of issues arising from the different approach.
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.
 
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ReBurn

Gold Member
So without reading the wall of text OP wrote, he/she believes performance will be affected if a 5.5gb SSD is used? As its not as advanced as the PS5 SSD? I would find this very hard to believe to be honest, Sony would take massive criticism if that happened.
They believe that PS5 has a magical SSD in the console despite the official specs saying it's 5.5 GB/s raw and that 5.5 GB/s sequential read m.2 drives Sony recommends won't be fast enough, thereby eliminating a future where every single game is built for 9 GB/s read speeds and hunger and poverty are forever eliminated along with loading screens. Because although compression technology is magical it cant't apply to m.2 drives.
 

NEbeast

Member
No. He's upset over the fact that the biggest tech advantage the PS5 has will potentially not be taken advantage of. The advantage Cerny spent literally 30 minutes shoving down our throat. The advantage that came at the cost of more graphical power. The advantage that came at the cost of fewer storage.

But you already knew what he meant and were being facetious, right?
Didn't Sony say a 5 5gb SSD wouldn't perform like the internal? Why is everyone ignoring this to spread concern, including you. Am I talking to the Sony bad slimysnake right now?
Mental Health 3D GIF by bbsquirrel247
 

Rikkori

Member
Right, but the consoles also have RAM, aren't they using some of it for the same purpose? I am guessing 16GB is just nowhere near enough to go by for video, system, and whatever we are talking about here.
Memory setup for consoles is shared, so the way it plays out even low/mid-range PCs have a huge advantage - that's why the faster SSD of the PS5 is meaningless when it comes to PC porting. Sony has a fast SSD because they can't afford more memory. Scaling storage (in all ways) is cheap but memory explodes in cost and complexity very quickly.
 

ZywyPL

Banned
Nothing to worry about. That infamous March 2020 PS5 reveal was nothing but a marketing/damage control campaign, and Cerny did a fantastic job on that, because fanboys not only swallowed it all up but even started to build their own theories/fantasies based on that event ever since, with the "but Mark Cerny said! are you Mark Cerny??" argument whenever someone tried to bring then down to earth, my personal favourite one is where games on PC will run on Low compared to PS5 ROTFL.

But everyone with at least half a brain knew long time ago that storage drive is exactly that, a drive that stores the data, nothing less, nothing more, while all that streamed data will have to hit the wall which is the GPU, that does all the computing, that draws and pushes the graphics onto your screen. But nooo, somehow the PS5 was suppose to "punch above its weight" (that's actually what SmartShift is there for, something that's also being heavily denied despite all the documentation on the tech being there).

People also kept saying over and over that the marketed sequential speeds aren't the same as random speeds, which are always orders of magnitude lower, which are the real-world scenario, hence now you see 3rd party SSDs easily matching the internal drive, despite the initial >7Gbps requirement claimed by Cerny, but again, people have been defending it with the "no bottleneck design™" narrative. Some people simply took the blue pill and remained in the Matrix, but now the drug's effect wears off and reality hits in hard.

Bottom line is, PS5's SSD is over engineered while bringing absolutely nothing to the table when it comes to the console's performance, again, something most normal people knew about long time ago, and now is even being debunked by Sony themselves and their studios. The only visual feature that's not GPU-bound, where the SSD might come in hand, are the textures, as seen with DS remake and R&C, but that's about it.
 

Md Ray

Member
Ok i finally enforced me to write this up. I did not wanted to because it stresses me out to a Level that iam exhausted. Exhausted by the realisation that internaly Sony is seeing PC as a very very big Source of Income and that they will do almost everything to make sure that Ports to PC will be possible easy and fast. Even cripple their own consolewich they spend Millions on to develop..

Ok lets dive in:

Cerny said in his Talk that PS5s internal SSD has 5.5Gb raw speed. And additional 4 priority Levels in comparision to normal Nand Drives. They come with 2. So PS5s SSD can use 6. Just a little later Cerny stated that in order to be on par with PS5s internal SSD the Third Party SSD would need to have some additional Speed to even out the missing 4 Priority Levels. Probably the Kraken Controllers job to synthesize 4 more prio lvls with the additional speed.

So much for that Talk and the Perspective he laid out.

so in Oktober last Year we heard that Western Digital would release the first PS5 certified Third Party SSD with their sn850 here the Article about that :

It was then also no suprise that the sn850 would bring a 7Gb raw Throughput on the table. Very much the overhead that we assumed would be neccessary to make up for missing 4 priority Lvls.

After that came nothing from Sony at all about the Third Party SSDs.. until NOW..

But what we miss here is what has happend within Sony in exactly that timespan inbetween the first report about WDs sn850 and this beta invitation with the infromation that a mere 5.5Gb would miraciously befast enough for PS5...
Off course it is about Sony engagement in PC gaming.
What was heard in that timespan?

Sony released more Exclusives and inofficial info about Uncharted4 and other Exclusives made it to the public. They bought Nixxes and everybody understands this as a move to help their PCPort strategy.

So they rated around summer last year the WD sn850 to be sufficiently fast enough to be on par with PS5s internal SSD.

Then came this big BIIG Intrest for PC Gaming to light.
And all of a sudden 5.5GB is enough to be "on par" with PS5s internal SSD?

The Thing is - 5.5GB will never be fast enough to be on par with the same SSD that has 4 Priority Levels more in its Sleeve.
The Problem here is sadly - while this is true - we never find out how much true it is.

Because:
We know that this SSD in the PS5 was planned to be used as a leverage for 9GB/s realtime datastreaming . First title who datastream in realtime many GB/s was Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. Insomniac tweeded out that they make use of real time datastreaming and that everything you do not see on screen is not in memory. - hence every move of the camera will induce a realtime stream of Data comming of the SSD.

So Ratchet and Clank seemingly work fine with a 5.5GB Third Party SSD like some ealry adopters of the beta Programm and indeed Insomniac themselfs point out . But Ratchet and Clank is far from using PS5 potential with they claimed openly in the DF Interview with John Linneman. They said (paraphrasing here) :,, we found out that our engine needs to be updated to be able to handle so much data at once."

So their Game cannot be a Benchmark for Third Party SSD at all.
Or can it?

If Sony allowes 5.5GB SSDs then no Devs Third Party or Sony Studios alike could make a Game that would need a SSD that needs a raw speed of 7GB/s period
That Train has left.

9Gb/s (up to 22GBs) Throughput of PS5 that Train has left too. I cannot imagine that they did not incorporate the PS5s additional 4 Prio Levels in these Numbers.
So since no further overhead available to the Kraken Controller there is no additional 4 Prio Lvls available for PS5 Exclusives also. Even on the PS5s internal SSD!! This Ghost is out of the Bottle and cannot be put back into it. Since all available Third Party SSD do not have those 6 Prio lvls , Developers now need to all the Time assume that someone puts a 5.5GB raw SSD with 2 prio lvls in his PS5.

PS5 Downgraded - one year after Release . Absolutly amazing!!!



And why????

because their internal projections were as such that PC Gamers will only very slowly adopt 7GB nand Storage and it would be immensly difficult (or outright impossible) to port Games form Sony Studios wich leveraged the full PS5s I/O capabilitys in the development of their respective exclusive Title.

With that of course is the dream over for immensly more detailed worlds wich would need 9GB/s of realtime Datastreaming. I could imagine also that they internaly tested this 5.5Gb/s to be equvivalent to Xbox capabilitys, further reducing PS5 specific Dev Effort..
Because to me a 5.5GB/s SSD with only 2 Prio Levels instead of PS5s internal 6 sounds quite like what the Xbox could dream to achieve with its mere 2.5Gb/s Storage.

I am sure that iam not to far off here in regards of all my assumptions and what sealed the deal here for me were actually the Twitters Actions of Insomniac Fitzgerald and Cerny himself.

First that Fitzgerald wrote this "5.5Gb oh yeah its fine its fine we tested it yada yada" Tin Can. He was pushed on that stage like a Clown on a Pub Stage by someone higher than him to go and write something the more technical PS5 Fans would swallow.

And when Cerny actually gave his recommendation for the "suprise" WD sn850,( remember ? It was rated last year under Sonys "old" Strategy , when PS5 capabilitys weren´t thrown under the bus for some more sells on PC) it was clear that he also is not happy with this decision. Clearly he is not. How could he?

Sony says 5.5GB raw is enough and the system architect recommends a 7Gb/s raw Storage?? Sounds like "civil disobidience" to me.
Hopefully this 5.5GB/s recommendation is pulled / denied/ dismissed so this this wall of text here has no validiy anymore.
I hope i am wrong. But i am not, iam afraid..
giphy.gif
 
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Daymos

Member
A mid range PC SSD is going to be like 3500 mb/sec or so, I think the steam deck (512gb model) is 2500?

So yeah, 3rd parties are going to port to PC and there's no way they would even require 3500mb/sec for their games as it would seriously reduce their audience. That applies to all Xbox games too since they are all on PC.

Imagine the freaking heat 7-9 gb/sec of data streaming generates... I just cut a hole in my ps4 pro cuz the fan is nuts and the TronicFix got 7 degrees less with a fan-hole (I don't have the screw drivers to tear it apart and replace thermal paste). I'm not convinced ps5 could handle the heat.
 
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Mr Moose

Member
2 issues.

Sony is recommending 5.5 for beta, not enforcing - so the premise indicates slower may even be acceptable.

Second issue; 5.5 internal is a custom solution for increased parallelism beyond any off the shelf drives. It would beg to reason off-the-shelf NVME drives to requires more grunt to bridge the gap since they do not have as many i/o channels and are therefore bottlenecked. Not speculation, just logic even confirmed by the Cermyster himself.

Now the only thing we can hope for is that the Beta is losey goosy with all this and final outcome will be precise enforcement of drive speeds.
They say even if you use one higher than 5.5 they can't promise it'll work as good as the PS5s and to transfer to it if it doesn't.
There is no problem here.
itsfookingnothing.gif

Games will be made for the one in the PS5, not all games are equal.
 

mrmeh

Member
Fastest mechanical hard disk (in best conditions) is under 250MB/s, PCI-E 4X SSDs 7000MB/s that's 28 times faster and yet PS4 games don't load 28 times faster on a PS5..

Above a certain speed, its all the other bits of the IO pipeline that are holding things back(some games need to generate world stuff as well i.e. Minecraft/Civ which slows things down as well). 5.5GB/s is plenty fast enough, most games will aim for the lowest common denominator which would be the slowest SSD's in pcs.

Just enjoy your console.
 
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RaySoft

Member
Ok i finally enforced me to write this up. I did not wanted to because it stresses me out to a Level that iam exhausted. Exhausted by the realisation that internaly Sony is seeing PC as a very very big Source of Income and that they will do almost everything to make sure that Ports to PC will be possible easy and fast. Even cripple their own consolewich they spend Millions on to develop..

Ok lets dive in:

Cerny said in his Talk that PS5s internal SSD has 5.5Gb raw speed. And additional 4 priority Levels in comparision to normal Nand Drives. They come with 2. So PS5s SSD can use 6. Just a little later Cerny stated that in order to be on par with PS5s internal SSD the Third Party SSD would need to have some additional Speed to even out the missing 4 Priority Levels. Probably the Kraken Controllers job to synthesize 4 more prio lvls with the additional speed.

So much for that Talk and the Perspective he laid out.

so in Oktober last Year we heard that Western Digital would release the first PS5 certified Third Party SSD with their sn850 here the Article about that :

It was then also no suprise that the sn850 would bring a 7Gb raw Throughput on the table. Very much the overhead that we assumed would be neccessary to make up for missing 4 priority Lvls.

After that came nothing from Sony at all about the Third Party SSDs.. until NOW..

But what we miss here is what has happend within Sony in exactly that timespan inbetween the first report about WDs sn850 and this beta invitation with the infromation that a mere 5.5Gb would miraciously befast enough for PS5...
Off course it is about Sony engagement in PC gaming.
What was heard in that timespan?

Sony released more Exclusives and inofficial info about Uncharted4 and other Exclusives made it to the public. They bought Nixxes and everybody understands this as a move to help their PCPort strategy.

So they rated around summer last year the WD sn850 to be sufficiently fast enough to be on par with PS5s internal SSD.

Then came this big BIIG Intrest for PC Gaming to light.
And all of a sudden 5.5GB is enough to be "on par" with PS5s internal SSD?

The Thing is - 5.5GB will never be fast enough to be on par with the same SSD that has 4 Priority Levels more in its Sleeve.
The Problem here is sadly - while this is true - we never find out how much true it is.

Because:
We know that this SSD in the PS5 was planned to be used as a leverage for 9GB/s realtime datastreaming . First title who datastream in realtime many GB/s was Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. Insomniac tweeded out that they make use of real time datastreaming and that everything you do not see on screen is not in memory. - hence every move of the camera will induce a realtime stream of Data comming of the SSD.

So Ratchet and Clank seemingly work fine with a 5.5GB Third Party SSD like some ealry adopters of the beta Programm and indeed Insomniac themselfs point out . But Ratchet and Clank is far from using PS5 potential with they claimed openly in the DF Interview with John Linneman. They said (paraphrasing here) :,, we found out that our engine needs to be updated to be able to handle so much data at once."

So their Game cannot be a Benchmark for Third Party SSD at all.
Or can it?

If Sony allowes 5.5GB SSDs then no Devs Third Party or Sony Studios alike could make a Game that would need a SSD that needs a raw speed of 7GB/s period
That Train has left.

9Gb/s (up to 22GBs) Throughput of PS5 that Train has left too. I cannot imagine that they did not incorporate the PS5s additional 4 Prio Levels in these Numbers.
So since no further overhead available to the Kraken Controller there is no additional 4 Prio Lvls available for PS5 Exclusives also. Even on the PS5s internal SSD!! This Ghost is out of the Bottle and cannot be put back into it. Since all available Third Party SSD do not have those 6 Prio lvls , Developers now need to all the Time assume that someone puts a 5.5GB raw SSD with 2 prio lvls in his PS5.

PS5 Downgraded - one year after Release . Absolutly amazing!!!



And why????

because their internal projections were as such that PC Gamers will only very slowly adopt 7GB nand Storage and it would be immensly difficult (or outright impossible) to port Games form Sony Studios wich leveraged the full PS5s I/O capabilitys in the development of their respective exclusive Title.

With that of course is the dream over for immensly more detailed worlds wich would need 9GB/s of realtime Datastreaming. I could imagine also that they internaly tested this 5.5Gb/s to be equvivalent to Xbox capabilitys, further reducing PS5 specific Dev Effort..
Because to me a 5.5GB/s SSD with only 2 Prio Levels instead of PS5s internal 6 sounds quite like what the Xbox could dream to achieve with its mere 2.5Gb/s Storage.

I am sure that iam not to far off here in regards of all my assumptions and what sealed the deal here for me were actually the Twitters Actions of Insomniac Fitzgerald and Cerny himself.

First that Fitzgerald wrote this "5.5Gb oh yeah its fine its fine we tested it yada yada" Tin Can. He was pushed on that stage like a Clown on a Pub Stage by someone higher than him to go and write something the more technical PS5 Fans would swallow.

And when Cerny actually gave his recommendation for the "suprise" WD sn850,( remember ? It was rated last year under Sonys "old" Strategy , when PS5 capabilitys weren´t thrown under the bus for some more sells on PC) it was clear that he also is not happy with this decision. Clearly he is not. How could he?

Sony says 5.5GB raw is enough and the system architect recommends a 7Gb/s raw Storage?? Sounds like "civil disobidience" to me.
Hopefully this 5.5GB/s recommendation is pulled / denied/ dismissed so this this wall of text here has no validiy anymore.
I hope i am wrong. But i am not, iam afraid..
I understand where you're comming from, but there is a workaround for this wich they might do. Let me try to explain.

Early reports said that the M2 would mount as a seperate drive, and not as an extension of the internal SSD. This could mean that Sony took the choice to enable the expansion bay now, even though the M2's that would fit the PS5 well, >7GB/s, are still very expensive. So expensive infact that maybe they decided to just go for a slower M2, for the time being and seperate it from the internal storage, so that games that abselutely needs the full internal throughput of the SSD would need to be installed on the internal drive. Other games, like R&C could be installed on the M2. This way people still get more storage, and probably in the near future, when prices drop and all M2's will saturate the gen4, they could release a firmware update that would merge the two SSD's into one.

It's only my theory, but it would mitigate your concern:)
 

Md Ray

Member
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.
The Office Thank You GIF
 

Portugeezer

Member
Even if they allow technically slower drives, just install PS5 exclusives on the internal SSD...

Most games are multiplatform, so any PS5 compatible M2 drive will be fast enough for all non exclusive games.
 
Ok i finally enforced me to write this up. I did not wanted to because it stresses me out to a Level that iam exhausted. Exhausted by the realisation that internaly Sony is seeing PC as a very very big Source of Income and that they will do almost everything to make sure that Ports to PC will be possible easy and fast. Even cripple their own consolewich they spend Millions on to develop..

Ok lets dive in:

Cerny said in his Talk that PS5s internal SSD has 5.5Gb raw speed. And additional 4 priority Levels in comparision to normal Nand Drives. They come with 2. So PS5s SSD can use 6. Just a little later Cerny stated that in order to be on par with PS5s internal SSD the Third Party SSD would need to have some additional Speed to even out the missing 4 Priority Levels. Probably the Kraken Controllers job to synthesize 4 more prio lvls with the additional speed.

So much for that Talk and the Perspective he laid out.

so in Oktober last Year we heard that Western Digital would release the first PS5 certified Third Party SSD with their sn850 here the Article about that :

It was then also no suprise that the sn850 would bring a 7Gb raw Throughput on the table. Very much the overhead that we assumed would be neccessary to make up for missing 4 priority Lvls.

After that came nothing from Sony at all about the Third Party SSDs.. until NOW..

But what we miss here is what has happend within Sony in exactly that timespan inbetween the first report about WDs sn850 and this beta invitation with the infromation that a mere 5.5Gb would miraciously befast enough for PS5...
Off course it is about Sony engagement in PC gaming.
What was heard in that timespan?

Sony released more Exclusives and inofficial info about Uncharted4 and other Exclusives made it to the public. They bought Nixxes and everybody understands this as a move to help their PCPort strategy.

So they rated around summer last year the WD sn850 to be sufficiently fast enough to be on par with PS5s internal SSD.

Then came this big BIIG Intrest for PC Gaming to light.
And all of a sudden 5.5GB is enough to be "on par" with PS5s internal SSD?

The Thing is - 5.5GB will never be fast enough to be on par with the same SSD that has 4 Priority Levels more in its Sleeve.
The Problem here is sadly - while this is true - we never find out how much true it is.

Because:
We know that this SSD in the PS5 was planned to be used as a leverage for 9GB/s realtime datastreaming . First title who datastream in realtime many GB/s was Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. Insomniac tweeded out that they make use of real time datastreaming and that everything you do not see on screen is not in memory. - hence every move of the camera will induce a realtime stream of Data comming of the SSD.

So Ratchet and Clank seemingly work fine with a 5.5GB Third Party SSD like some ealry adopters of the beta Programm and indeed Insomniac themselfs point out . But Ratchet and Clank is far from using PS5 potential with they claimed openly in the DF Interview with John Linneman. They said (paraphrasing here) :,, we found out that our engine needs to be updated to be able to handle so much data at once."

So their Game cannot be a Benchmark for Third Party SSD at all.
Or can it?

If Sony allowes 5.5GB SSDs then no Devs Third Party or Sony Studios alike could make a Game that would need a SSD that needs a raw speed of 7GB/s period
That Train has left.

9Gb/s (up to 22GBs) Throughput of PS5 that Train has left too. I cannot imagine that they did not incorporate the PS5s additional 4 Prio Levels in these Numbers.
So since no further overhead available to the Kraken Controller there is no additional 4 Prio Lvls available for PS5 Exclusives also. Even on the PS5s internal SSD!! This Ghost is out of the Bottle and cannot be put back into it. Since all available Third Party SSD do not have those 6 Prio lvls , Developers now need to all the Time assume that someone puts a 5.5GB raw SSD with 2 prio lvls in his PS5.

PS5 Downgraded - one year after Release . Absolutly amazing!!!



And why????

because their internal projections were as such that PC Gamers will only very slowly adopt 7GB nand Storage and it would be immensly difficult (or outright impossible) to port Games form Sony Studios wich leveraged the full PS5s I/O capabilitys in the development of their respective exclusive Title.

With that of course is the dream over for immensly more detailed worlds wich would need 9GB/s of realtime Datastreaming. I could imagine also that they internaly tested this 5.5Gb/s to be equvivalent to Xbox capabilitys, further reducing PS5 specific Dev Effort..
Because to me a 5.5GB/s SSD with only 2 Prio Levels instead of PS5s internal 6 sounds quite like what the Xbox could dream to achieve with its mere 2.5Gb/s Storage.

I am sure that iam not to far off here in regards of all my assumptions and what sealed the deal here for me were actually the Twitters Actions of Insomniac Fitzgerald and Cerny himself.

First that Fitzgerald wrote this "5.5Gb oh yeah its fine its fine we tested it yada yada" Tin Can. He was pushed on that stage like a Clown on a Pub Stage by someone higher than him to go and write something the more technical PS5 Fans would swallow.

And when Cerny actually gave his recommendation for the "suprise" WD sn850,( remember ? It was rated last year under Sonys "old" Strategy , when PS5 capabilitys weren´t thrown under the bus for some more sells on PC) it was clear that he also is not happy with this decision. Clearly he is not. How could he?

Sony says 5.5GB raw is enough and the system architect recommends a 7Gb/s raw Storage?? Sounds like "civil disobidience" to me.
Hopefully this 5.5GB/s recommendation is pulled / denied/ dismissed so this this wall of text here has no validiy anymore.
I hope i am wrong. But i am not, iam afraid..
Your wall of text didn't have validity to begin with. It's all speculation based on out of context misinterpreted quotes. Never believe PR.
 
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