News Fast Load Times: PlayStation 5 Tested With Expansion SSD

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Considering how warm the 980 pro can run, the heat sink is indeed a good idea.

Hopefully the drivers reach maturity soon and it will be quite the feature, maybe a 2 TV drive saturating the PS5 maximum transfer speed.
 
On the transfer speeds between internal and additional storage, could it be that the internal SSD is tweaked specifically for fast read speeds and not so much on write speed. The main thing for writing to that drive would be in downloading games which would be limited by internet speeds. So a slower write time is not that big of a deal. It seems that a lot of the stuff in modern SSDs is around SLC caching and fancy things to keep write speeds fast. But if you're system isn't going to do a lot of write intensive work, seems to make some sense to leave those feature out.
 
Sleepy_Hollowed said:
Considering how warm the 980 pro can run, the heat sink is indeed a good idea.

Hopefully the drivers reach maturity soon and it will be quite the feature, maybe a 2 TV drive saturating the PS5 maximum transfer speed.
Click to expand...

Actually, all Samsung drives are designed to run very warm. I was reading into this with my samsung M.2 SSDs, and the drives are designed to run warm and it is not recommended to put heatsinks on the drives unless there's almost no air cooling on the drives.

This is because the NAND flash is at risk of running too cold, which can hurt performance of the drive. So if you see memory controller temps in the 90s, that's normal.

This is what i read for 960 and 970 series drives, so i'm assuming its the same for the 980s.

But, for the PS5, you really should put a heatsink on since there is no airflow. Plus with no airflow, temps should be warm enough for the NAND to operate well.
 
It would be interesting to see if the PCIe 4 requirement can be hacked, or officially removed. There are several 2TB NVMe PCIe 3 drives for around $200, and it would be interesting to see if there is any difference whatsoever between PCIe 3 and 4 NVMe drives in practice, since we know in practice on desktops even cheap NVMe SSDs are quite snappy in load times. The WD Blue SN550 now has a 2TB version currently at $200 at Newegg, and the 1TB version was reviewed by TH last year and loaded FF XIV faster than the Gen4 Crucial P5 Plus.

1TB Performance Results - WD Blue SN550 M.2 NVMe SSD Review: The Best DRAMless SSD Yet | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

1TB Performance Results - Crucial P5 Plus M.2 NVMe SSD Review: Affordable Gen4 Performance | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)
 
usiname said:
don't spread missinformation, the operating temperature for 980 according the specification is 0-70C, 90+ is dangerous, even 70 is high, you should keep your ssd as cool as possible!
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Please read more carefully, I said the memory controller temperatures. Not the Nand. (but i will admit I do not know what the 980 Pro's memory controller temps should be, and Samsung does not state what temps they operate at.)

And please stop spreading misinformation, you should never keep your SSD as cool as possible, that will result in SSD problems: https://electronics.stackexchange.c...s-on-an-ssd-negatively-affect-its-reliability


Rather, the NAND should be operating at a specific temperature range, though granted, a heatsink will probably be fine. You just gotta check what the NAND temps are running at. But I've heard for Samsung in general, you want to have the drive run hotter than cooler generally.
 
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Alvar "Miles" Udell said:
It would be interesting to see if the PCIe 4 requirement can be hacked, or officially removed. There are several 2TB NVMe PCIe 3 drives for around $200, and it would be interesting to see if there is any difference whatsoever between PCIe 3 and 4 NVMe drives in practice, since we know in practice on desktops even cheap NVMe SSDs are quite snappy in load times. The WD Blue SN550 now has a 2TB version currently at $200 at Newegg, and the 1TB version was reviewed by TH last year and loaded FF XIV faster than the Gen4 Crucial P5 Plus.

1TB Performance Results - WD Blue SN550 M.2 NVMe SSD Review: The Best DRAMless SSD Yet | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

1TB Performance Results - Crucial P5 Plus M.2 NVMe SSD Review: Affordable Gen4 Performance | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)
Click to expand...

It would cause serious issues on games expecting the extra speed to avoid loading, causing tickets and support calls.

It would be insane for Sony to allow that, since they planned to use that to their advantage, and in contrast to PC, where the minimum is puny, the minimum speeds for PS5 drives are quite beyond the average PC drive, especially with the current electronic component shortage.
 
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Sleepy_Hollowed said:
It would cause serious issues on games expecting the extra speed to avoid loading, causing tickets and support calls.

It would be insane for Sony to allow that, since they planned to use that to their advantage, and in contrast to PC, where the minimum is puny, the minimum speeds for PS5 drives are quite beyond the average PC drive, especially with the current electronic component shortage.
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Except The Virge already did a test with a slow PCIe 4.0 drive, ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite, rated for 3,900MB/s reads, and the difference was negligible to none compared to the much faster Sabrent Rocket and internal SSD. While this is a good 33% faster than cheap PCIe 3 NVMe drives like the WD Blue SN550, it seems the extra speed is not a hard requirement.

In fact, Sony themselves state "Sequential read speed: 5,500MB/s or faster is recommended" on the drive requirements page, it does not say "Minimum required read speed", so it is entirely possible that even PCIe 3 NVMe drives would meet the requirements for on-the-fly asset loading with the only noticeable difference being a couple of seconds of game load time.




PS5 SSD speed test: slower drives work - The Verge
 
The PS5 reads from ssd 99% of the time and when it writes it's mostly at network speed so the ssd isn't in danger of overheating
 
Yeah it’s not like modern consuls use SSDs like a PC or a server configured to run a massive database. Speeds aren’t that critical
 
Alvar "Miles" Udell said:
It would be interesting to see if the PCIe 4 requirement can be hacked, or officially removed. There are several 2TB NVMe PCIe 3 drives for around $200, and it would be interesting to see if there is any difference whatsoever between PCIe 3 and 4 NVMe drives in practice, since we know in practice on desktops even cheap NVMe SSDs are quite snappy in load times. The WD Blue SN550 now has a 2TB version currently at $200 at Newegg, and the 1TB version was reviewed by TH last year and loaded FF XIV faster than the Gen4 Crucial P5 Plus.

1TB Performance Results - WD Blue SN550 M.2 NVMe SSD Review: The Best DRAMless SSD Yet | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

1TB Performance Results - Crucial P5 Plus M.2 NVMe SSD Review: Affordable Gen4 Performance | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)
Click to expand...
Not that simple, PS5 games uses the SSD in a different way, it relies on the SSD to load textures and huge chunks of data, it acts like RAM. PC games in the other hand only uses the SSD to feed the RAM, and, aren’t taking advantage of SSDs. It’s hard to notice any difference between sata and NVMe SSDs. That’s why any SSD comparison on windows can’t be used to measure the performance on PS5. So yes, the extra bandwidth on PCIe4 is needed for PS5 games. You can’t reach anything near that with PCIe3, even less if it is a cheap PCIe3 SSD.
 
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