Jeff's SSD Dream - Is the SSD-enabled console dream dead?

No rumors we've heard say anything about an SSD in the new Xbox. That isn't conclusive proof, but we're now looking at 2 of the 3 consoles not having a built-in SSD for caching.

SSDs are magical. Everyone who has one says it's the best PC upgrade they've made in X years and that the benefits are immediately obvious. Couldn't Microsoft or Sony find a warehouse full of 16 GB SSDs or something?

I'm pretty bummed that this isn't happening. Do any of you care?

Was the dream ever truly alive ?

I prefer more drive space anyway, so I'm cool with a regular drive.

I can put up with mediocre loading times when I play on console, I play most my games on PC as I usually have the choice of doing just that.

My PC has an SSD so I can enjoy the faster load times there when I choose to buy the PC version of a game, the only chance the next consoles have of having SSDs is:

- If they combine a cheap SSD (32GB or so) that you can choose to install select games to AND include a mechanical hard drive for bulk storage (Doubt it)

- They don't mind these machines costing upwards of $600 to include all this new tech + a 128GB SSD (I have to wager that'd be the minimum SKU)

A 16GB is a dumb idea. Most PC games are 12-16GB, game sizes will increase and it's unlikely even one game will fit on a 16GB SSD. 32GB would probably be plenty for most, unless Hideo Kojima is behind the game...

Even if they went the route of a 32GB SSD + mechanical drive for storage, would you really want to constantly have to move games on and off the thing? I find it annoying enough to take games on and off the 128GB SSD in my PC.

I would say that it wouldn't be as much a necessity as they are on PCs and it would probably add to the cost of machines which are already going to be expensive as all hell to make.

Who said an entire game would go on this thing? It could just as easily be a cache for the most often-used data. And the 360 already has an automatic cache thing but I have no idea how it works.

I guess Jeff will be out of video games again then.

The margins are slim on console hardware where suggesting "why couldn't they just find some small drives?" ignores the cost vs benefit. SSD drives are fast but they aren't as large or as durable. Given how people flip out at the RROD, are people going to be happy with smaller, quicker to fault drives in their consoles?

Modern custom built PCs use both SSD and "classic hard drive" because one allows fast access while the other offers large storage that is easy to RAID.

ps: The "360 automatic cache" is just the hard drive. Nothing magical about copying data off a DVD and reading it off the disk.

Couldn't they add SSD's whenever they felt like during the next generation? Like not have them out the gate but have them optional later in the cycle. I don't think they would really change anything about the consoles.

I would think that SSDs are still to expensive for the amount of storage they offer for the next consoles going so heavily in a digital direction for SSDs to really be super viable at this point. Hell, with a 32 SSD you might be able to fit a single Bluray onto it and that's all you'd get. For a comparable price of a 32GB SSD you could get a 1TB HDD and reasonably expect to not really have to worry about storage capacity unless you buy a ton of games and you only get them digitally. Sure, they load slower and wear down over a long period of use, but with console gens lasting ~8 years the latter isn't a huge issue. Especially when the harddrive breaking probably won't be the thing that kills your system.

I can't see it on the PS4 with all this talk of recording HD video. SSDs just wouldn't be large enough.

Only way there would be any form of SSD on the PS4 is in the form of a hybrid harddrive. However there doesn't seem to be any mention of anything that could resemble this (as the ssd part of the hybrid system would more than likely be integrated) so most likely it'll be an old school hdd.

However with the suspend mode, and the biggest advantage on ssd being read speed and access time, the need probably wont be as great as on this generations consoles. And the faster bluray will improve install times aswell. Besides ssd's are only now starting to have reliable controllers. Just last year there were top brand ssd's sold with controllers that could fail and wipe the entire disk.

As much as I love ssd (have 2 in my pc, one for system and one for gaming) I think the risk and cost is too great at this point.

Next gen maybe. But by that time platter based harddrives have probably evolved beyond what we have today aswell.

Sony will want to put in big ass hard drives so you can easily download games and movies without worrying about HDD space and SSD's are just to expensive for large size storage.

I just don't see what the benefit of SSD in a console would be. The only benefit an SSD offers you is faster reads and (generally) faster writes. For example, on the PC, the SSD will improve the initial game load time and maybe in-game load times, because it's pulling data from the hard drive at fast speeds, but that is literally the only function it speeds up. Once your application and its data has been loaded into memory, the SSD is just sitting there, contributing little.

Which means that for it to benefit a console, you would have to install games to it. Even if you devised a system that only installed the most frequently accessed parts of a game to the hard drive, it wouldn't take many games before you started consuming all of your SSD's limited storage space (especially when you consider how many tens of gigabytes a game can potentially be, on Bluray). A decent SSD for consumers runs around just under a buck a gigabyte, right now. That's $256, $128, or $64, for accordingly sized drives. Even at wholesale manufacturing prices, they probably aren't cheap enough to build into consoles at any usable size.

If the prices on SSDs drop very significantly over the next decade, I could see later iterations of the consoles moving to SSD storage, but at the moment -- compared to the nickel or less per gigabyte of SATA drives -- I don't see it being even remotly realistic. And, yes, like @Grimluck343 mentioned, the recording function would quickly consume that (drive performance degrades fast when you hit or exceed 80% space utilization and recording high quality 1080p at 30fps easily uses gigabytes per minute. Even with fast encoding on-the-fly by the onboard chip they mentioned being dedicated for the recording/streaming, it would be too large for an SSD.

Wait, who said it's not happening? Can people back their shit up with facts?

SSD still to pricey

I've had an SSD for almost a year now, and even though I love it for fast resets, fast installs and quick loads on some games. The difference between it and a modern spinning drive isn't that jarring for a lot of everyday stuff, frankly I'd rather have the relative peace of mind size and stability-wise of a 500gb+ HDD in a console that I expect to just work.

Trim.

Alignment.

If those words mean nothing to you, that's exactly why a SSD is not a good idea for consoles. Each and every SSD will get slower and eventually fail. Sometimes after months, sometimes after many years -- but it is inevitable. Unlike with HDDs, there are no early warning signs like strange clacking noises. You just boot up the console one day and it is simply gone. I doubt console manufacturers want to deal with that.

You can already throw an SSD into a PS3 if you desire. You can probably do the same with the PS4, unless they totally drop the ability to swap out the hard drive without buying one of their proprietary offerings.

I'm pretty meh about the whole thing. Of course, I haven't actually bought an SSD for my PC yet, simply for the reason that once I get used to one, I won't want it any other way. Maybe I would feel more strongly if I had one in my own machine, but I can live without it in next-gen consoles.

yeah, here's hoping that remains the case. even if it doesn't however- i have a standard hdd on my pc, and i never really notice the load times. so not such a big concern of mine.

SSD is unfortunately still too expensive and with all that will be packed into a next gen console the PS4 wouldn't be able to fit an SSD into the budget. There will be other ways to offset load times anyway if that's all the SSD in a console was good for.

SSDs are pretty sick, but they're still super expensive compared to hard disk drives, they also need a few more years under their belts to prove (and improve) reliability over the long term. Hard drives were a thing in people's home computers for over a decade before the original Xbox came out.

Also, the amount of benefit you get out of them for the cost of manufacture, at this point, is still very low. Just how important is it to be able to write to an SSD at 500 megabytes per second, inside a video game console?

I like my SSD, but they price of it for how many Gigabytes it contains is a little steep, when it becomes cheaper, it may become a reality.

Uh what? SSDs are more reliable than mechanical drives, no idea why you are making it sound like it's the other way around. As for the Trim stuff then that's simply irrelevant, all of that now happens without you having to do a thing, at least it does on the latest versions of OS X and Windows. If a console has an SSD inside it and isn't properly managing it then someone fucked up badly.

and I've had mechanical drives simply go kapow with no warning in the past, it happens.

It's a stupid dream to have right now anyway. SSD's are still far to expensive. When you can put in a 128GB HDD for pennies on the GB an SSD pretty much translates to 1 dollar per GB it's not economical. They could do it if they wanted to, but then the price would more or less skyrocket an additional 100 dollars. Do people want more power or cheaper prices? In the middle of a recession I can pretty much predict what the answer is.

They just have to continue letting people replacing the hard drive with whatever they want. They can't put one in there it would be way too expensive for too little storage.

This sounds like a good solution to me. It would be great if they could include two SATA bays so that we could put in an SSD in addition to whatever HDD they ship with it. That will never happen, but it would be nice.