News Xbox Series X/S SSD Cards Will Cost $220, Only External Way to Play Next-Gen Games

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transitioning from one cell to the next takes a lot of coordination on a system with slow I/O.

You don't need that much coordination if you have enough spare memory to pre-load stuff ahead of time. Also, your "super-fast IO" games still need to cope with the occasional case where assets may fail to load in time, which means having to implement many of the same mitigation mechanisms (default objects/placeholders/boxes) that would be required on slow storage if you don't want the game to freeze or crash.

 

[TerryLaze]

which means having to implement many of the same mitigation mechanisms (default objects/placeholders/boxes) that would be required on slow storage if you don't want the game to freeze or crash.

So even more reasons that the nvme drives won't be forced for most games.

 

[nofanneeded]

Microsoft !!!

we need this in Notebooks and Tablets !!!

 

[cryoburner]

Wow, this is going to be big. The main internal drive could well not last that long if it gets heavy use during games and people are also moving games off and on it a lot.

If I had to guess, it's probably not using QLC flash like the cheapest NVME drives, and with a 1TB capacity, there will be a good number of flash cells to go around for wear leveling. Even some 1TB QLC drives offer 300TBW of endurance, enough to write 100GB to the drive every single day for over 8 years. A lower-end TLC drive like the 1TB WD SN550 is rated for double that, and that's a drive that can be had for around $100 less. It's hard to say exactly what writes will be like on these drives, but I don't think write endurance will be much of a concern.

This to be honest isn’t too bad, compared to the Samsung 980 Pro of the same size they are in fact quite reasonable.
If anything it further highlights how good a deal we are getting with the Series X.

I also rather doubt that they're putting anything comparable to a $200+ PC SSD in there though. As is common with these sorts of add-on peripherals, there's undoubtedly a large amount of markup over what equivalent PC hardware would cost. That's part of how they make their money after selling the initial console hardware below what it costs to manufacture.