PlayStation 5 - Next gen is expensive

[footle]

13 minutes ago, Freeman said:

The copy time could be quite long (though possibly not as long as downloading, broad band speeds depending) then add potential for a mega update... It’s a solution, but it’s not really ideal.

Of course what we do know is 1TB is going to be filled up pretty quickly especially with 4K assets, so hopefully whatever solution is in place is easily manageable and not too restricting, along with expansion of course

 

1TB is getting filled up almost immediately, unless there have been some huge gains in compression.

I think I've 3TB of Xbox games already, and I don't even have Call of Duty 200GB + 84GB patch edition installed.

 

But times - 50GB game, 50MB local transfer speed - about a quarter of an hour to stage; 50Mbit/s download speed 2 and a quarter hours. 100MB local transfer speed - about 8 minutes.

[df0]

As someone fortunate enough to have a fast, steady and reliable internet connection can I just ask why do you have 3TB of games installed? I realise games grow bigger and bigger (Witcher 3 is like 80GB or so, Doom 2016 is also ridiculously large), but how many of those big games do you need to have at the ready at all times?

[Pob]

10 minutes ago, Freeman said:

 

Because, you the player will know best. For example, maybe you’ve just completed a game and want to go back to an old staple, but your console has preloaded that new game you’ve preordered that’s our next week. It would archive the old game, you’d arching the one you’ve just finished...

 

The copy time could be quite long (though possibly not as long as downloading, broad band speeds depending) then add potential for a mega update... It’s a solution, but it’s not really ideal.

 

 

These are easily-surmountable UX problems that I'd hope are designed into the OS. What I would hope is that the platform holders have thought carefully about the SSD / HDD combo use case and not just thought "fuck those guys, they can just buy another of our SSDs right?".

 

It will surely be a common problem that people will be juggling their storage with these new hyper-expensive SSDs and there's a chance for one or both platform holders to make it really easy for the user.

 

[MattyP]

Just now, df0 said:

As someone fortunate enough to have a fast, steady and reliable internet connection can I just ask why do you have 3TB of games installed? I realise games grow bigger and bigger (Witcher 3 is like 80GB or so, Doom 2016 is also ridiculously large), but how many of those big games do you need to have at the ready at all times?

Indeed. Tend to only have one or two "big" games installed at any one time. If I haven't played something for a while I just delete it. Easy. Only have a 1TB SSD drive on my PC and manage fine with that.

[footle]

1 minute ago, df0 said:

As someone fortunate enough to have a fast, steady and reliable internet connection can I just ask why do you have 3TB of games installed? 

 

Laziness. Never underestimate laziness. Also planning.

My connection is about 40-50MBit/s sustained, so your 50GB game is a 2 hour 40 download, after which I probably want to do something else and not play Forza Horizon 4 again for half an hour.

[MansizeRooster]

Yeah, I rarely need access to more than 3 games at any one time really.

[Pob]

Let's not forget also that PSN and XBL can be quite unreliable with download speeds, whereas USB transfer is a known quantity.

 

In fact, how would USB 3.2 transfer speeds compare to the average fibre connection, assuming the servers could utilise the available bandwidth?

[teddymeow]

So, the SSD in the PS5 is 825GB. 

 

Is that 825GB that is all available to the end user?

 

This then leads to my next question: how much of that 1TB Xbox Series X SSD is available to the end user? How much is partitioned off for the OS etc?

[rafaqat]

30 minutes ago, Pob said:

 

Cool that's the bare minimum that I expect. This still seems odd to me:

 

 

Why do I, the user, need to babysit that? Shouldn't the OS archive off games I've not played for ages to make room for a new game, with the option for me to take manual control if I so wish? Perhaps this is such an obvious QOL feature that they've not even bothered to mention it.

 

I reckon that'll become a feature fairly soon if not at launch.  Similar to how they managed game updates at launch to how they do them now. It's evolved. Not perfect but it's kind of based on which games you play most often.  Less used games would have an update ready when you want to manually do it.   Wouldn't surprise me if the archiving logic worked the same way.  

Try to fire up a game you've not played in a while?   Get notified of an update being required and copy across whatever else the game needs to the SSD.

 

 

 

[MattyP]

1 minute ago, footle said:

 

Laziness. Never underestimate laziness. Also planning.

My connection is about 40-50MBit/s sustained, so your 50GB game is a 2 hour 40 download, after which I probably want to do something else and not play Forza Horizon 4 again for half an hour.

Indeed. It's just about changing habits really I guess. Easy enough to leave a few of your go-to games on your drive and then have a current game you are playing the most at any one time. 

 

It is what it is I guess. I'd rather have SSD tech and fast access than have a slow spinner drive with lots of storage. I prefer this when a compromise has to be made.

[df0]

1 minute ago, footle said:

 

Laziness. Never underestimate laziness. Also planning.

My connection is about 40-50MBit/s sustained, so your 50GB game is a 2 hour 40 download, after which I probably want to do something else and not play Forza Horizon 4 again for half an hour.

Fair point

Like @MattyP and @mansizerooster I have a 1 TB drive in my PS4 Pro and that is generally more than enough. Anywhere between two and five big games installed, about 20 smaller indie-sized games (anything less than 10 GB) and I have room spare.

[Qazimod]

20 minutes ago, Alex W. said:

 

The trouble with automatic archiving is that inevitably the console's going to archive something that the player wanted to keep on there, and they'll get mad that the computer did the wrong thing. Always safer to have the computer do less than to automatically do something bad. Unless you use the words "machine learning" or "algorithms" in which case people will let you do it.

Maybe a compromise could have been for something to check play data and say “you haven’t played this in eight weeks - would you like to ditch it and free up space?” Or make a pending folder that’s in between “in your main games folder” and “in the archive”, so that the player is aware of what’s going on...  

[footle]

18 minutes ago, teddymeow said:

So, the SSD in the PS5 is 825GB. 

 

Is that 825GB that is all available to the end user?

 

This then leads to my next question: how much of that 1TB Xbox Series X SSD is available to the end user? How much is partitioned off for the OS etc?

No. It includes system storage. You give the biggest number possible.

No idea. Some.

[teddymeow]

33 minutes ago, footle said:

No. It includes system storage. You give the biggest number possible.

No idea. Some.

 

So Sony have gone out had somebody make an 825GB SSD? Surely that will add to the cost of build?

 

[df0]

I like to think it's a 1 TB drive with parts gated off which results in 825 GB.

[footle]

1 minute ago, teddymeow said:

 

So Sony have gone out had somebody make an 825GB SSD? Surely that will add to the cost of build?

 

It’s custom. Some proportion of any SSD’s flash chips is redundant anyway.

The SSD in the PS5 is bleeding edge tech at the moment, and where a large part of their build cost will lie. (The same applies to the Xbox one, but a bit less bleeding edge: it’ll still be a lot more expensive than the HDDs were).

 

That £599 number yesterday: don’t be surprised if it’s more that way than £399.

[RubberJohnny]

1 hour ago, teddymeow said:

So, the SSD in the PS5 is 825GB. 

 

Is that 825GB that is all available to the end user?

 

This then leads to my next question: how much of that 1TB Xbox Series X SSD is available to the end user? How much is partitioned off for the OS etc?

 

Someone worked this out:

 

Quote

Nadav Ziv points out that “the storage space advertised is never the same as that obtainable, and this is because the unit of measurement used by manufacturers of hard disk drives (mechanical and SSD, editor’s note) to advertise their devices is in GB, but hard disks used to work in GiB”. In practice, then, the SSD with 1TB of the Xbox Series X should be available “only” 931GB, while the 825GB equipped on the PlayStation 5 should not be more than 768GB of actual space.

 

Then you have to reduce it further by the amount of space the OS takes up, the PS4 OS takes up 57GB, for example, so really you'd be about 710 GB assuming it's around the same size if not bigger next gen, Xbox around 870 GB.

 

That means PS5 can have three 3.5 copies of Modern Warfare installed, whereas Xbox can have 4.25 copies.

[footle]

Just now, RubberJohnny said:

 

Someone worked this out:

 

 

Then you have to reduce it further by the amount of space the OS takes up, the PS4 OS takes up 57GB, for example, so really you'd be about 710 GB assuming it's around the same size if not bigger next gen, Xbox around 860 GB. There's 75% of a Modern Warfare install between them.

then further by the overprovisioning ratio on the SSD - another 10% or so.

[df0]

Thanks for the info.

Not knowing how massive PS5 games get, but from experience with PS4 game sizes I'd say 700 GB is enough for me.

[spanx]

2 minutes ago, footle said:

 

That £599 number yesterday: don’t be surprised if it’s more that way than £399.

 

Fully anticipating a £499 price point minimum. Above £500 feels like a big psychological jump, although it does sound like this and the Series X are both packing a lot of power (and cost). PS4 Pro and X prob the mainstream purchases for at least another year.

 

I've been saving like a mother the past few months so I'll prob try and get one this year. Hopefully they won't be horribly scarce 

[teddymeow]

If it's £499 (or less) then I would pre-order one for launch.

 

More than that and I'll have to do some serious "household convincing".

[SuperCapes]

2 hours ago, SeanR said:

5kMbs?

 

isn't that the same as 5Gb/s?

 

[edit]

are you sure you mean 5000 megabits per second?

 

5000 MB/s (read) and 4400 MB/s (write)

 

2 hours ago, footle said:

 

Problem is that it's also ridiculously expensive for the type of stuff Sony are pushing. I do like the idea that it's commodity though - eventually it should become affordable. Whereas the ridiculous prices of bespoke Microsoft hard drives on previous consoles was quite off-putting.

 

Yeah they are not too cheap but the prices have come down significantly! I paid £200 for a 256gb Samsung NVMe a couple years back, where now you can get a 1tb Sabrent Rocket PCIe 4 NVMe for £170. Personally I do not mind paying £150ish on top of launch price of the PS5 if it will double my storage, but that might just be me! This wholly depends on Backwards compatibility too. I will likely be using the PS5 for exclusives only, so doubt they would fill the inbuilt SSD for a few years, whereas if it supports all the current PS4 exclusives I will likely need to double down pretty quickly! Like you say though it is a commodity, and not a necessity . 

[Alex W.]

4 minutes ago, RubberJohnny said:

 

Someone worked this out:

 

 

Then you have to reduce it further by the amount of space the OS takes up, the PS4 OS takes up 57GB, for example, so really you'd be about 710 GB assuming it's around the same size if not bigger next gen, Xbox around 860 GB. There's 75% of a Modern Warfare install between them.

 

Yeah, the maths works out. If it's a 12-channel SSD (confirmed) then 12 x 512 Gbit chips works out at about 750 GB of actual storage, you have to apply the storage manufacturer fudge factor to get to 825 GB. Although you could argue that makes it like-for-like for comparisons with existing HDDs.

[gospvg]

I think it will be £599 but will come with a mobile phone type pay monthly contract for 2 years at £30 per month.

[teddymeow]

Horizon Zero Dawn composer tweeted earlier. 

[footle]

6 minutes ago, spanx said:

 

Fully anticipating a £499 price point minimum. Above £500 feels like a big psychological jump, although it does sound like this and the Series X are both packing a lot of power (and cost). PS4 Pro and X prob the mainstream purchases for at least another year.

 

I've been saving like a mother the past few months so I'll prob try and get one this year. Hopefully they won't be horribly scarce 

 

It's the £599 + games cost that would make me wonder; whereas the £599 + existing games pass sub for the first party launch exclusives (so there's something to play on it, even if they're just the shit first party launch games) makes the Series X seem cheaper. Probably depends on what Sony bundle with it, how amazing Horizon 2 looks, and what's actually out at launch.

 

(Though I'm kidding - I didn't buy a PS4 Pro and just stuck with the PS4, so I'm well up for this).

[sid]

1 hour ago, footle said:

 

1TB is getting filled up almost immediately, unless there have been some huge gains in compression.

I think I've 3TB of Xbox games already, and I don't even have Call of Duty 200GB + 84GB patch edition installed.

 

But times - 50GB game, 50MB local transfer speed - about a quarter of an hour to stage; 50Mbit/s download speed 2 and a quarter hours. 100MB local transfer speed - about 8 minutes.

They’ve done the analysis - most of the time 800-odd GB is enough to satisfy the vast majority of gamers playing habits. Ie they mostly play a handful of games over a rolling 2-4 week period

 

By the time it’s an issue the price of expandable drives will hopefully have come down.

 

i think they’ve smashed the storage side of things out the park tbf 

[gospvg]

I went with the PS4 on launch and then the Pro on launch so if they have HZD 2 on launch I am day 1.

[Down by Law]

5 minutes ago, teddymeow said:

Horizon Zero Dawn composer tweeted earlier. 

 

Also Velocity 2X which is a brilliant soundtrack  

[Calashnikov]

We all getting smashed for this, aye?