Not a huge surprise, I suppose. If having to retrieve data from the optical drive is a real possibility (as on consoles) game designs that lean heavily on SSDs extraordinarily good random I/O capabilities are going to suck brutally, since optical drives are second only to tape in being miserable at random I/O.
A good contemporary SSD should at least keep pace with, if not surpass, a cheap HDD at linear I/O, and of course stomp on it at random I/O; but a well designed console game shouldn’t be imposing random I/O chatter on the storage system in the first place.
The larger take-away is how the hybrid offers a good cost/benefit ratio for anyone willing to swap for a different hard drive. While the SSD offers faster reads overall, the cost of hybrid drives win it over.
Course, I would love to see the difference between the stock 5400rpm (?) drive and a 7000rpm drive. Or even a 10000rpm for the fun of it. I still think the hybrid would still offer overall performance, but I’d love to be proven wrong!
I also like this video because it keys more into the demands and engineering for games which have a much higher data need than say a web browser or other application without high graphic needs. Nothing new to me as a video game developer, but I consider that knowledge more a privilege and love to see that kind of knowledge shared more!
I read a review recently that showed pretty disappointing stats for the seagate hybrid drive. What I’d wonder about, is does the ps4 support TRIM?
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