I would be even harsher: I would take it a step further and say that article writer is either ignorant or plain-dishonest.
Agreed. They get 2 fast HDDs and run them in RAID 0. Costs much less and they get much more storage space. RAID solutions are available on most mother-boards, these days...and especially the gaming motherboards.
I do see what that FistOfThe North is saying about HDDs vs. SSDs.
And boy does it make a ridiculous difference in gaming. Load screen times are absurdly fast. I usually don't have enough time to read the "tips" on the load screens when I travel between areas.
HOWEVER.....putting a drive like that in a console would literally double the price. From $300 to $600 (these are assumptions on my part). If people just throw in an SSD just to say that an SSD is in the system, then it would be a waste. You pretty much have to go to mid to high-end SSD to notice significant differences.
Here's the kicker: do you think console gamers would invest more into their consoles if the consoles had swappable hardware? For instance, installing an SSD or Graphics Card?
Nintendo tried something like that with the N64. How did that pan out?
In a world where most games are around 5-8 gigabytes in size, paying roughly a dollar a gig is pretty expensive. It's a problem I'm having now. I've erased every game that I don't play on a daily or bi-daily basis, yet between starcraft 2, planetside 2, dawn of war 2, dragon age origins/awakening, mech warrior online and ghost recon online, my 100gb ssd has only 10gb's of space left, and I have NO movies, music or images on it.
That isn't cost-effective.
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See, thinking that that is an acceptable price is fine for a hardcore gamer but not the majority. As dadude says, a decent SSD would price the console out the market.
Not to mention the lifespan worries on SSDs would be a much bigger worry with consoles.
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It can't be worse than the Wii Mini. Nintendo seemed to miss the concept that the late-cycle small version of your console is not meant to be actually worse than the original.
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I think that a mass production order, for something like a console, would net us a 1TB, internal HDD, for $40 or less per drive (that is what someone like Sony would have to pay).
Is it possible to make a $300 console and include all those delicious specs? Possibly. But when you start adding things like a SSD, it gets really expensive.
I'd buy a PS4 for $550-$600 if it included a high-performance 250GB SSD.*
Maybe they should make it* an option? What do you KMC people think?
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And how may issues over a ten-year ownership of a console of the SSDs stopping working they want to deal with. SSDs are not long-term prospects like that, and unlike the kind of PC owner who buys SSDs, the average console owner doesn't want to mess around replacing their storage.
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Well, they could make SSDs swapping very easy.
It's been a while since I researched SSDs extensively, but SSDs have gotten immensely better. Additionally, I don't know how console gaming usage behavior would affect reads and writes on the SSD. I could imagine it to be much less of a strain on the drive.
My hunch is that a 10 year usage of the 100$ SSD would be possible.
As far as I know at the high end the problem is more than solved and SSDs are much better, with far longer expected lifetimes than HDD ever had.
I really think the main problem is the price issue. Especially with games getting bigger and sold more digitally.
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Hmm, I dunno. I don't think any console company would be willing to take the risk of ten year reliability of SSDs, even if they were affordable. Maybe next generation. It doesn't take much of a failure rate to be a huge issue.
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Older SSDs have issues with running out of read-write attempts on the MLCs (multi-level cells). Newer models, anything after 2005-06 era, have algorithms that make an even use of the MLCs to prevent them from wearing out too quickly. What this means is, now, SSDs have a longer life span, under normal use, than any HDD is capable.
If you put them both up for a continuous 0s and 1s write, sure, the HDD will outlast the SSD. But the distribution algorithms working at the hardware level on the SSDs make normal use (even high-use for people that do video and photo editing) vastly outlast the HDDs.
For those interested in the algorithms used to increase the longevity of SSDs, they call this approach "wear-leveling."
I still say that you really need a SSD that would outpace a SATA II interface before you really start "feeling" the speed benefits of an SSD. Those will cost you over $300. And the extreme majority of console gamers are not going to buy a PS4 that costs $600.
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I'm not convinced, especially dating is as long ago as 2005-6. From all I've seen and the tests done on them, people are not willing to guarantee the 10 year life of an SSD, and that would make them a poisonous proposition for a console. No-one is going to take the risk.
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Last edited by Ushgarak on Feb 28th, 2013 at 01:49 PM
Yeah, I have an SSD in my computer...but it's for running games off of. Not for anything vital.
Also, while they may not be all that pricey in reality...the price for the amount of space you get makes SSDs very expensive. I have one only because I picked it up on sale on Black Friday. I wasn't going to pay $130 for a 128gb harddrive.
That article made me laugh. You cannot directly compare PC components to console components. For starters, if the components that went into a console cost as much as the average gaming PC's components, no one would buy it. People buy consoles because they don't want to spend $1000+ on a gaming machine. Not to mention the fact that components are custom-made for consoles, and what goes for a console is going to be completely different for a PC. That article, for example, mocked the fact that the PS4 will have 8gb of DDR5 RAM. Well, for starters...8gb of RAM in a console is a ridiculously huge amount because they don't have a massive OS eating up half the RAM. Second, it's all DDR5 - PC RAM is DDR3. Right now you generally only find DDR5 on GPUs. There's also the fact that it's an x86 APU - AMD makes very good parts for lower prices, and APUs are good options as everything's integrated together. I tend to suggest to people when building a PC on a budget to go for an APU processor and then upgrade with a better GPU later down the line. In this case, since it's all integrated together, it's that much easier for devs to work with, as they only have one thing to optimize for - any PC gamer knows how annoying it can be to see optimization issues between CPU and GPU.
I'm also going to laugh at anyone that calls the 7850 a midrange card. It's really not. There are only a handful of options that are more powerful than it right now. A midrange card would be in the 6850/7750 range, and I'd call that the high end of midrange. I put a 7750 in my mother's computer and it's amazing the performance I can get out of that sucker.
That article kind of really bugs me, because it falls into a superiority trap that is pretty common amongst PC vs. console stuff. I do primarily PC stuff now, but I've been a console gamer my entire life...and believe me, there's a reason why console gaming is far more common. It's simply easier to deal with. No worries about making sure everything meets specs or having to upgrade down the line or trying to figure out what piece broke if something went wrong. The other thing is that you do not need everything to be super high-end cutting tech in a PC to game. It is more than possible to play things on high settings on a mid-range computer. Some PC gamers like to do things as super high-end as possible, but that's not even close to being required, and acting like it is for everything ever is just being snobby and irritating.
Semi-related, I was looking at the requirements for the new Tomb Raider if you want to play it with the advanced graphic settings, and was surprised at how my computer - which I built on a strict budget and hence doesn't have a super high-end processor - more than shattered those. I had to remind myself that a slightly dated CPU and GPU is more than sufficient to run pretty much anything at high settings anyway. Sure, an i7 is nice, but a Phenom X2 or X4 is more than enough for the vast majority of games out now.
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I think it's also worth remembering that Sony pushed the specs on the PSP and Vita, and neither time did it actually translate into particular success. So I think Peach is right to look at this from both angles- first, that articles like that almost certainly underrate the practical performance of the components, and second, there is no actual need to be as powerful as technology allows; indeed, such an approach is counter-productive.
I sat through the era when console gaming in Europe took off- remembering that there was no mid-80s video game crash in Europe and home computers dominated throughout the 80s and early 90s, with Sega and Nintendo much slower to get a market hold than in the US. I remember things like the 3DO pushing the tech specs like crazy, but the cheaper and more sensible consoles killed it, even without the established base they had in the US and Japan.
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Last edited by Ushgarak on Feb 28th, 2013 at 02:50 PM
I'd say the cell processor they did for the PS3 is a perfect example of pushing specs but it not panning out. Sure, it's really powerful. It's also incredibly difficult to work with. Dumping that and going with a PC-based architecture - an APU even - is probably the smartest thing they've done in a long time. That's going to make it so much easier for devs to work with, and make it much easier for games to be properly optimized to take advantage of the hardware, so that even if it's not as powerful as the most superpowerful computer out there, it's still going to look damn good.
SSDs are so reliable, now, that most big names have a 2 to 5 year warranty. I had a hard time finding warranties like that for big name HDDs...you have to purchase extended warranties for those. For example, high-end Barricuda drives have a 2 year but most are just 1.
However, just because manufacturers offer longer warranties for their hardware, that does not mean that they are more confident in their product and can offer such long warranties.
Most current SSDs have a life-span of over 100 years. One. Hundred.
Feb 25th, 2013 09:40 PM
