Making Sense Of The PS5 SSD Array
Making Sense Of The PS5 SSD Array
Back in March when Sony unveiled the hardware powering the PlayStation 5, it left many of us scratching our heads as to why they went with 825GB for storage space. Yet now we have our first look inside of the console, it’s clear why. The teardown shows that Sony went with a six drive array. That’s right, the PS5 doesn’t have one SSD, it has six. The PS5 packs six TH58LJT0T24BA4C Toshiba BiCS 3D memory flash chips. Each Toshiba chip is 128 GiB or just over 137GB. The six drives are powered by a custom SSD controller to make it all work as one.
Sony has used a fairly amazing technique to keep the storage close to the CPU while maximizing space on the system board. The PS5 has a floor of 5.5 GB/s when it comes to transferring data. VHerald is reporting that the number could reach as high is 17 GB/s. Not all of the details today have been great news for PlayStation fans. Unfortunately, this seems to bear fruit to the recent leak that the PS5 may only have 664GB of free space. While the odd number of 825 GB was often assumed to be the storage space available to the player out of the box. Certainly, this can no longer be the case.
Additionally, this could explain why we don’t have a removable storage option for the PS5 yet. Back in February PS5 architect, Mark Cerny did note the technology would be hitting stores this year as consumer computer parts. Even so, there would have to be something that works in conjunction with this technique while not altering I/O throughput (transfer speeds). Although there should be NVME SSD’s compatible with the PS5 for consumers this year. It might be best to wait for the prices to drop. The PS5 will still allow PS4 games to be played from external drives, just not PS5 games.
This is actually really bad news. If the SSDs are in RAID0, then 1 failing will wipe out the entire array. Since the SSDs are onboard, the entire console would have to be replaced. 6 SSDs in RAID0 = 6X the likelihood of failure compared to a single SSD. That is *nuts*. If it’s a JBOD array, then that means files can’t span across the SSDs, which in turn means storage is terribly inefficient.
6 SSDs can mean RAID6 also- which is common in enterprise. Its stripping and two parities instead of 1 like raid 5. 6 drives are usually the standard (unless you are using zfs). So at most 2 could die off and the whole array could still function. It just means much less space and write speeds not being that good at all. Read speeds are amazing. I’m guess they are probably limited by the AMD chip.
Fair. Per r/hardware on Reddit it’s actually a single SSD with multiple physically separate module connected to a custom controller. To me it sounds like Sony tried to reinvent the wheel.
Now they’re stuck in a weird situation in which they have an SSD expansion slot but can’t actually support any 3rd party SSDs because the latter are likely to have different performance and behavior from the onboard storage and so possible result in degraded UX.
Why is nobody taking about how stupid it is to have the SSD built onto the Motherboard. Now if it fails you have to get a whole new PS5. But i supposed this could be what they intended, so they could milk fans for more money in the long run. Sony is not exactly known for their strong customer support either.