SSD for PS3

[metacarius]

Something of a zombie idea, but interested in seeing if the prevalance of more hard drive intensive games (downloads from PSN, etc.) has changed the answer much on upgrading a PS3 to an SSD.

Back in the day, the consensus seems to be that it's not a substantial speed increase due to other hardware bottlenecks and definitely not woth it for the price. Though honestly, the one real benefit everybody could seem to agree on was the lack of noise. Now that the prices are down on the SSDs, perhaps the idea is worth revisiting?

Thoughts?

 

[jordonc]

Check out these links
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-can-ssd-upgrades-boost-ps3-performance
http://www.hardcoreware.net/ssd-on-ps3-performance-guide/
http://community.us.playstation.com/t5/PlayStation-3/PS3-Drive-Comparison-HDD-vs-SSD-New-and-Improved/td-p/5734185
The last one is the only source I could find that addressed a game from the psn store. The startup time of the game was nearly halved. The source is questionable at best, though, so take it with a grain of salt I suppose.

 

[jay2tall]

I had the SSD thought about 2 years ago, I have the 120GB Slim. At the time a 120GB SSD was $300 and there was no way I could vouch for buying a drive that cost as much as the PS3 itself. My biggest driver was when I started to play Gran Turismo 5 and the loading for races was painful and even just navigating around looking at the car dealer just seemed to take forever. I did my reading and looked into a few things and settled on a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drive. At the time it was $90 after a Newegg coupon. I picked it up and installed. It made an extremely noticeable difference in every way. In GT5 the loading was cut by half or by a significant percentage depending on what I was doing. Because the Hybrid drive has a 4GB MLC SSD cache it builds this up and keeps recent and continuously access data on the SSD portion. Moving around the screen was by far the greatest treat. I think the simple nature of a PS3 makes the hybrid drive function better than it would in a PC with windows. The PS3 OS probably takes up a very small amount of the SSD so it leaves alot of room for game data. I also noticed that once a download is complete the patch installs are much faster and just any disk IO in general is simply faster.

This is my drive running for 2 years now and am happy as a clam. I also did not have to sacrifice disk space and was an upgrade in every way. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591&name=Laptop-Hard-Drives

Search it on YouTube as there are some videos for this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS5ABHNZZn8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYYvcVb79mY

 

[robnof]

An ssd is in many ways a big upgrade for a console. One of the most notable; load times greatly decrease.

 

[woggy101]

Something of a zombie idea, but interested in seeing if the prevalance of more hard drive intensive games (downloads from PSN, etc.) has changed the answer much on upgrading a PS3 to an SSD.

Back in the day, the consensus seems to be that it's not a substantial speed increase due to other hardware bottlenecks and definitely not woth it for the price. Though honestly, the one real benefit everybody could seem to agree on was the lack of noise. Now that the prices are down on the SSDs, perhaps the idea is worth revisiting?

Thoughts?

No No and No.

Yes a SSD is alot faster than a traditional hard drive this is true however the PS3 use's Sata 1 so yes there might be a slight increase in load time's but the PS3 will never be able to take full advantage of Sata 3 so it dose not warrant the price of an SSD

 

[jay2tall]

^SATAI is accurate. However, a 5400RPM hard drive is not going to come anywhere near maxing out the 150MB/s interface. Depending on what PS3 model you have you can have varying transfer speeds because of newer hard drives. But most of them will not even saturate half of that bandwidth. You also have slower randon read/writes on a spindle drive. A SATAII SSD or Hybrid drive will maximize the SATAI bandwidth and random read/writes will be much faster. So if you are going the SSD route, it doesn't have to be anything fast at all, so you can go on the cheap. this is why a Hybrid drive is a nice option, best of both worlds. You get the SSD caching and the drive capacity for a nice price. I know this first hand and it was completely worth the $90 I spent.

Here is a good little wiki for you: http://www.ps3devwiki.com/wiki/Harddrive

 

[Krynnost]

The hybrid drive will be your best bet if you want to max out the abilities of your PS3's read times (though I don't know if the PS3 will take full advantage of it either, if it's a SATA I in the PS3). Performance wise it should fall somewhere between a 10,000 rpm drive and a SSD, on a PC with SATA II/III. I don't believe anyone makes a 10000 rpm drive that will fit in laptop drive sized space. Bear in mind that the PS3 case doesn't exactly have a layout designed to do much to keep your drive cool. Reason I went with a simple upgrade to a larger drive, larger cache, but same interface and rpms. Maybe I was being a bit too cautious, but there weren't many posts then other than recent upgrades.