Ps5 custom ssd whats so special about it?

[MATT The Geek]

WHATS so special about it

[AndreiArgeanu]

The SSD itself isn't special but the hardware around it is. As in there are lots of measures taken that mitigate bottlenecks that you would otherwise have in your average PC running a pcie 4.0 ssd, meaning that there are going to be some games, especially exclusive one's that won't be able to run on a PC due to the bottlenecks, and the fact that not many people have PCIE ssd to start with.

[AndreiArgeanu]

You can find all this detailed in Sony's video named Road to PS5 where Mark Cerny explains everything about the PS5 including the ssd in detail. On the left you can kind of see how the SSD is bottlenecked and on the right how the SSD would potentially run in the PS5 with the bottleneck mitigations.

 

 

[AndreiArgeanu]

Linus also has a bit of a explanation of the storage in the PS5 in his apology video. Of course we don't know everything about the storage and it's inner-workings, however hopefully we'll find out not too long after the launch in november.

 

[MATT The Geek]

ok thanks man

 

[TheBean]

its mostly optimisations sony made on the hardware side to reduce bottlenecks and allow game data to be sent directly to the gpu instead of going through the cpu first. they also engineered their own custom firmware and custom ssd controller i think

[NewMaxx]

The only thing unique about the SSD itself is that the controller is 12-channel. Therefore if you have 12 two-plane dies of TLC at 512Gb/die you will get ~5000+ MB/s reads (example math here - actual tR would be lower) with 825GB (768GiB) of storage. The drive itself is DRAM-less and relies on SRAM because you don't need a lot of mapping metadata if the data is in large, contiguous chunks, as you have with streaming - that is to say, sequential and compressible data (which also reduces the amount of storage required). The PS5 and Series X both have a hardware accelerator/block for compression, Kraken and BCPack respectively with Zlib fallback. While the PS5 also has a DMA block and co-processors the XBox utilizes DirectStorage instead to use some of the general purpose CPU for management.