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Next-gen internal storage: lower capacity SSD or higher capacity HDD?

I can see some internal flash memory inside the PS4 or the next xbox. Probably 32GB, maybe 64GB. Today you can have 8GB of NAND flash (MLC the one used for in SSD) for roughly $6.10 at contract prices. In the case of 32GB, you would spend 24.40$ on your BOM on flash chips, adding the controller costs (maybe $5-$10 more?). Overall between $30-$35.
18-24 months double the capacity for the same price.
 
Whoa they are!? That's amazing! I figured they would cut costs as much as possible. SSD is sweet.

The Wii had an SSD too you know. They cut costs by with a mediocre capacity single flash chip solution. You're typical PC SSD has something like 8+ flash chips in the same housing, hence the high capacity and costs.
 
64GB SSD + 500GB HDD

this would allow gamers to load one to three games into the SSD at a time for improved performance while still having a lot of space for other media and game storage.
 
the initial units will use traditional hdd.

The cost cutting revisions will probably use lower capacity ssd. I dont know, but i think ssd becomes cheaper over time unlike hdd. so it would make sense in that regard.
 
I highly doubt any console next gen is going to have an SSD but maybe a smaller one. I'd expect 500 GB to be the standard size at the beginning.

The idea of an optional SSD peripheral as mentioned earlier in this thread is pretty ridiculous. By the time you add the 100% "console peripheral" tax the things would be like 300 bucks.
 
I'm thinking Sony may do something similar to the 360 and just include some flash memory and leave a space for a HDD/SSD. Good for keeping costs down compared to having a standard HDD.

By the time these consoles launch 32/64Gb would be fairly cheap.
 
I can see some internal flash memory inside the PS4 or the next xbox. Probably 32GB, maybe 64GB. Today you can have 8GB of NAND flash (MLC the one used for in SSD) for roughly $6.10 at contract prices. In the case of 32GB, you would spend 24.40$ on your BOM on flash chips, adding the controller costs (maybe $5-$10 more?). Overall between $30-$35.
18-24 months double the capacity for the same price.

I don't think MS, and Sony especially, would add $30-$35 to the cost of their machines unless it's necessary. And SSDs aren't a necessity at this point.
 
SSDs would be too expensive to be the standard right now. It will probably be standard (larger) HDD for next generation. They COULD make the next gen consoles able to take full advantage of the SSD speeds, which would be a nice option for those who want the benefits of SSD.
 
I don't even want to know how much they'd charge for a proprietary SSD.

Unless you're a really serious benchmarking enthusiast, there's no point in getting a SSD. The thought of having one in a console is ridiculous. With that said, a high capacity standard HDD will be sufficient.

I could see 120-160 being a reasonable starting point. 250, 320 and 500 would be "premium" editions.
 
I will take a high capacity hdd any damn day of the week. With gaming heading more to DD we will need them. I'd love to see 250 gig be the absolute smallest hdd they have. Also bring back every damn console having a hdd. MS actually did something good with the Xbox doing that only to backtrack this gen. Sony luckily did put one in every PS3. Course mandatory installs becoming the norm on the PS3 really freaking eats the hdd space on smaller sized hdds.
 
I don't even want to know how much they'd charge for a proprietary SSD.

Unless you're a really serious benchmarking enthusiast, there's no point in getting a SSD. The thought of having one in a console is ridiculous. With that said, a high capacity standard HDD will be sufficient.

I could see 120-160 being a reasonable starting point. 250, 320 and 500 would be "premium" editions.

SSDs are useful beyond "benchmarking." I like the fact that it takes about 10 seconds or so to go from POST to 100% ready Windows, and within a couple of seconds of that I can have my web browser, music player, email, etc all opened. Not to mention big slow ass productivity software that can take ages to load opens up a lot faster on a SSD.

And are those prices for proprietary SSDs, or GB of storage space? Less space than what is available in current gen consoles won't happen because it would actually cost more since smaller capacities aren't in production anymore. That's why Sony keeps releasing revisions with more storage, and why MS has been increasing their HDD space as well.
 
The only thing I can see happening is an upgrade slot for SSD. I think the next-gen consoles will launch with 120gb-ish 7200rpm HDD's, upgradeable via proprietary shit. That also goes for Sony this time.

With the improved tech and read speeds in the next-gen consoles I expect mandatory installs to become less of an issue anyway.
 
If it was a PC, I would go with a hybrid one (an HDD that holds a small SSD for OS and other purposes).

But as this are consoles and HDDs mean moving parts (i.e. shittier console that breaks) and installs and patches, which are all things I loathe, and the reason I play videogames on consoles and not PCs, then I'll go with SSDs.

I hate when developers releases unfinished or badly tested games and I have to wait a month to get it fixed, and this is basically what is happening with console games this days (with major first and third party games) and it fucking sucks.
 
The cloud. If I was in the console selling business and I wanted to encourage a subscription system for online play and features, I would force a model much like apple's iCould. You start off with free 5GB and as you fill it up with stuff you can opt to increase it by increasing your monthly subscription fee.


Fuck yeah let's install 8GB of game to the cloud. Now you can make a fucking wedding reception while your favourite game installs and a sandwich for every member of your family while it loads. No really, what the fuck?
 
I can't wait for the day that Solid State Hard Drives offer decent storage sizes at a reasonable price.

Also, don't expect to see any system be like the PS3, Sony is going to lock the PS4 down tighter then fort knox.
 
FTFY I'd never buy anything but Intel because its failure rates are 4-5x lower than other brands (and even lower than HDDs). And I paid $300 for a 160 gig SSD.

That comparison was from early gen SSD's and is not neccessarily and accurate view of current offerings.

Competitors have improved, and Intel uses a totally different controller on their current drives. You can't make reliability assumptions from totally different designs.
 
I'm not very tech minded, but what about optional upgrades, extra objects and such with more detail streaming from hdd?
While I'm a SW dev, I'm not a gaming dev and certainly haven't worked on an engine that does realtime streaming. That said I'd imagine it could get complex fast. In general, I'd expect devs are going to target the lowest common denominator in terms of timing for loading new areas.

How big of a share from PS3 games get improved from SSD use?
I haven't actually tested it, but I believe there are some threads here. In general I'd assume any game would have faster loading times.

The problem though is PS3 is actually only exposing a SATA I bus (1.5 Gbit/s). It's not even SATA II let alone SATA III. So the bottleneck is in the interface. You really won't see a huge increase regardless of the speed of the actual SSD.
 
the initial units will use traditional hdd.

The cost cutting revisions will probably use lower capacity ssd. I dont know, but i think ssd becomes cheaper over time unlike hdd. so it would make sense in that regard.

Its got to be SSD from the beginning, the advantage in later revisions will be minimal and not worth the cost.
If they go with SSD from the start, you have a set figure bandwidth that you design a game around to stream data from.

Even platter HDD in next gen consoles should be better as these should have better read/write speeds than the original 20GB launch ones from 360/PS3 that games have to be designed around.
 
God no not SSDs.
The prices of those next systems would be ridiculous and would add at the very least an extra $150 for a cheap SataII SSD at the very least, and at a somewhat decent size.
 
SSD's are still to costly to add to next gen consoles, it'll be next-next-gen before we will have affordable SSD's that have sufficient memory.
 
If you read through the thread, you'll see some of us are advocating something that's a bit more complex than that.

I read through everything since this topic is of interest to me, since I really would love the speed of SSDs on next-gen consoles. But at their current prices that's impossible. What will probably happen is the continuation of HDDs and bigger drive sizes, but what I'm hoping for is the ability to install an SSD drive at a later date, like the PS3 allows.

Excuse my ignorance on the topic, but I had the impression that while the PS3 can have an SSD installed, but the speed is capped at something much lower due to the SATA thing? Well, I just want the PS4 to have SATA III installed. However possible that is I don't know, but the fact that it should be an option is key here.
 
Most likely I'd see 250GB and 500GB SKUs. Maybe 320GB/640GB.
Just where platter tech and production is I think.

SSDs no. Maybe in the 5th revision, 3rd gen Slim model.
 
God no not SSDs.
The prices of those next systems would be ridiculous and would add at the very least an extra $150 for a cheap SataII SSD at the very least, and at a somewhat decent size.

I think what people are more interested in is an SSD as something *other* than a mass storage device; as that link between RAM and conventional HDD.

I'd be very interested to see just what developers could do with 4 or 8GB of fast SSD tied to a conventional HDD system next generation.
 
Just give me a high capacity regular HDD from the get go. I don't want any of this pussyfooting around giving us a small HDD to start and incrementally releasing over priced bigger HDDs every year. There are larger HDDs out now because the need for more space is recognized, and that need should be standard by next generation. 250GB minimum for consoles equipped with a HDD (because lord knows microsoft will probably release a SKU with a $20 tumbstick worth of memory)
 
There is no chance of the next consoles shipping with large capacity SSD's. You'll likely see the OS on a small SSD, and then larger hard drives standard.
 
I read through everything since this topic is of interest to me, since I really would love the speed of SSDs on next-gen consoles. But at their current prices that's impossible. What will probably happen is the continuation of HDDs and bigger drive sizes, but what I'm hoping for is the ability to install an SSD drive at a later date, like the PS3 allows.
What I meant is that me and some others have been speculating whether a (relatively) small, dedicated OS/game cache using SSD NAND flash chips may be viable (or potentially even cheap/slow RAM - though that would probably present MoBo cost/size issues unless it's on a daughter card - and that presents its own cost/size issues).

In conjunction with that however, would be a 2.5" drive like PS3. And obviously it would come with a traditional HDD for cost reasons. One difference I'd like however is for it to at least be SATA II, though SATA III would obviously be preferred.

This would give the benefit of an 'SSD' since devs can design their games with the expectation of the fast cache ... not be too cost prohibitive ... and the users would still have a large HDD for game installs, media, and other content (though they could upgrade to an SSD if they so choose). Basically it would be the best of both worlds.

Excuse my ignorance on the topic, but I had the impression that while the PS3 can have an SSD installed, but the speed is capped at something much lower due to the SATA thing? Well, I just want the PS4 to have SATA III installed. However possible that is I don't know, but the fact that it should be an option is key here.
Yep, that is correct. And I would love SATA III, though even SATA II would be a dramatic improvement.
 
we all know they're going to ship them with like <100gb and force you to upgrade to an HDD that only works on the system and then they will block all third parties from making cheaper ones
 
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