For years Microsoft boasted their upcoming Series X; at the time, codenamed Project Scarlett was going to be the most powerful console that ever existed. Other than the most loyal fans, most scoffed at this claim right up until Microsoft revealed they intended to live up to the crazy hype they had created. Unsurprisingly technological advancement had allowed them to produce a console of significantly higher power than the Xbox One. To Sony’s dismay, on paper it looked like it would vastly outperformed their upcoming and potentially higher-priced Playstation 5.
Leaving Sony only able to claim their hard drive was so advanced, so spectacular that it would compensate for the slower ram and CPU, along with 2TFLOP power difference in their graphic processing. Not only is their hard drive advanced, but it is going to be the most advanced Solid State Drive on the market bar none because it has a high IOPs rate.
This marketing jargon echos even from Sony’s partnered companies. Tim Sweeney, whose company has teamed up with Sony for the development of Unreal Engine 5. In a recent statement, as reported by IGN, he had the following to say about the hard drive.
“I think, first of all, Sony has a massive, massive increase in graphics performance compared to previous generations. But you know, I guess we get that every generation? But Sony’s made another breakthrough that in many ways is more fundamental, which is a multi-order magnitude increase in storage bandwidth and reduction in storage latency.”
“We’ve been working super close with Sony for quite a long time on storage. The storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on anything on PC for any amount of money right now. It’s going to help drive future PCs. The PC market is going to see this thing ship and say, ‘Oh wow, SSDs are going to need to catch up with this.”
The problem? It’s all absolute bullocks! For starters and IOPS (input/output operations per second) without information system response time and program workload is an entirely useless metric. Having 500,000 IOPS is the equivalent of saying a disk-based drive rotates at a certain RPM. Yes, it means data can be loaded faster, but if the application/game and Playstation 5 OS can’t utilize the max speed, it is a functionality that will never be utilized. Rendering it an unnecessary addition to the unit’s cost. Whose value could have been better allocated towards RAM, CPU, or the GPU.
Devils Advocating then, although as you will see, they are still lying, that their statement is truthful. That their Solid State Hard Drive is the most advanced on the market and a game-changer, it would mean that for Sony, this is the Cell Processor 2.0: Memory Boogaloo.
Why? Simple. Outside Sony’s in-house studios, few developers or publishers will make use of the functionality. To do so would require them to have two simultaneous versions they must bug test and optimize: A standard version and the Playstation 5 version. Some developers might take advantage of that for ports, but the majority of the industry will simply achieve parity with standard PC and Xbox Series X. As there is very little need to utilize such a function and no profit to be gained from doing so.
Now they claim this is the most advanced in the industry. That when it launches, it will force the competition to step up their game. Unsurprisingly the woke console manufacturer and Sweeney have no idea how the PC market functions. Simply put, Sony’s 5gb 500,000 IOPS isn’t the most advanced on the market. Commercially the most advanced was Dell’s EMC DSSD D5, which operated at 100gb 10,000,000 IOPS. It was discontinued, but Israel’s E8 Storage (100gb 10,000,000 IOPS) SanDisk/Western Digital’s Fusion-io ioDrive2 (96gb/ 9,608,000 IOPS), and numerous others continue to operate magnitudes above the specification for the PS5.
Looking at the standard market, you have Samgsungs Samsung 970 EVO, which operations a full gigabyte faster than Sony’s HHD. Intel’s Optane SSD 900P series matches Sony’s performance. Leaving Sony’s SSD as neither the most advanced nor even that revolutionary as far as the common market is concerned.
What Sony is offering is nothing more than a high mid-end hard drive with the PS5. Any outlet that represents this as anything but is either woefully ignorant or intentionally being deceptive.
