TR Forums

This is Gamespot's video:
http://youtu.be/u8_nt2Dwf78
Looks pretty simple. SSD drives do work and it seems like there is a significant speed difference, though they only tried single downloaded game. Not sure if PS4's OS is TRIM-aware, though...

Realistically I'd say something like 750GB WD Black drive is a better option in terms of price and performance for majority of people. Especially considering its 5-year warranty.

Which current generation SSDs have firmware garbage collection? Seems those would be most ideal.

That's awesome, glad someone's confirmed it works. I really can't believe the Xbox One still won't allow users to easily swap out the drive for something larger/faster than the basic disk.

Ryu Connor wrote:

Which current generation SSDs have firmware garbage collection? Seems those would be most ideal.

I'm not aware of a single modern SSD without garbage collection!

I know the Corsair Neutron GTX has a particularly aggressive garbage collection config out of the box, but there was another SSD I can't remember that topped even it in reviews.

Ryu Connor wrote:

Which current generation SSDs have firmware garbage collection? Seems those would be most ideal.

Last I checked almost all of them had at least that with only a few exceptions, but that was several months back. Still, I can't help but think that the problem with a console like this is more the size of its storage and less it's speed. Maybe that 1TB SSD might have a home here, but I can't help but want to prefer a 2TB or 3TB HDD for this sort of thing. That way you could just download all the games, movies, music, and whatever else you want without having to manage your memory. These consoles usually don't have great interfaces for managing things anyway. I remember deleting files was a chore on my old Xbox 360, and I used to wish for more space over speed.

Nice. This might actually be a perfect usage scenario for Hybrid drives, like this one.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... PDKIKX0DER

But I think a model with 16GB of nand might be more useful...

It would be exciting if they allowed multiple sources of storage. I load BF3/BF4 off of a cheap SSD that I threw into a USB3 enclosure when playing on my laptop, and it's still significantly faster than using the internal 750GB WD Black, so I know that the interface can handle gaming just fine.

Consoles seem to be a great candidate for the hybrid SSHDs, especially for gamers who tend to stick to one title for a while until they beat it or get bored.

What file system is the PS4 using? For firmware-level garbage collection to work doesn't it need to be able to understand the file system?

derFunkenstein wrote:

What file system is the PS4 using? For firmware-level garbage collection to work doesn't it need to be able to understand the file system?

I don't think so? At the most basic level, it just has to wait until the drive has been idle for a while before actually erasing data marked deleted on the block level. That doesn't require knowledge of the file system on top.

But how does it know if it's marked deleted if it can't read the file system? I might be asking a really basic question that everyone already knows the answer to, maybe I'm just missing it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... ection.png

It's not the most efficient option, but it's file system independent.

derFunkenstein wrote:

But how does it know if it's marked deleted if it can't read the file system? I might be asking a really basic question that everyone already knows the answer to, maybe I'm just missing it.

http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/ ... sd-primer/
That has more details if you're interested.


In any case, as Ryu noted, it's not very efficient which is why TRIM is preferable (i.e., the filesystem tells the SSD that you can skip the copy because that block can be GC'd as is).

derFunkenstein wrote:

What file system is the PS4 using? For firmware-level garbage collection to work doesn't it need to be able to understand the file system?

Sony uses a custom version of FreeBSD 9 as an OS, so whatever file system it natively supports (ext4? ZFS? UFS?). Most likely with some encryption.

derFunkenstein wrote:

But how does it know if it's marked deleted if it can't read the file system?

That's what TRIM does. If your filesystem doesn't send down TRIM commands, then the drive can only do garbage collection on blocks that aren't full. Of which there are more than you think, because the erase block size is not the same as the write block size, and neither may be the same as what the filesystem considers the minimum unit (sector, cluster, whatever). So in cases where a file gets rewritten, what typically happens is that the SSD writes the new file to new (empty) blocks, and then goes back and erases the blocks containing the old version -- and there's usually some empty space ("slack") left over at the end of the file. It may also do some shuffling of blocks for wear-leveling, so that it swaps blocks that were only written once with blocks that have been written multiple times, possibly doing some consolidation of that slack along the way. All of this happens behind the filesystem's back, which thinks everything is still in the same place. Obviously TRIM improves things because it gives the GC more empty or erasable blocks to work with rather than trying to preserve the blocks containing file contents the filesystem knows to be deleted.

Thanks guys, I figured I was just not understanding. Ryu's image (which ChronoReverse's link also uses) and Uber's explanation seem to point in the same directly, and neither of them would lead me ashtray.