| Title | How many games will 500GB hold on the next-gen consoles? |
| Author | Nick Diamon |
| Posted in | News |
| When | September 3, 2013 |
At E3, both Sony and Microsoft touted their next-gen consoles' ability to expand their hard drive storage with external options. As it turns out, there are some clarifications for both machines..
Read the full articleWhat do you mean? My 40gig PS3 and 60gig 360 (minus OS and update bloat) are perfectly suited to modern DLC and online purchasing models. I am sure they are perfectly anticipating the life of the hardware and their desired income models without relying on me to upgrade my consoles to look like USB octopai or purchase new SKU models later on.
Well...kind of sure. Er. Well. No, I am with you now. I'm hosed aren't I?
I'm *so* glad I switched to PC.
Why do they have to take simple things and make them complicated, negatively effecting their consumers?
Since when does the 360 support external storage in any meaningful (i.e. gaming relevant) way?
I have a USB Bus Powered 2TB External HDD that I have connected to my WiiU which cost me around $100. That is where all my downloaded games get stored.
Why is WiiU the only next-gen on this issue?
because you don't want to do that for AAA games. A game that heavily depends on loading data will profit from the better speed of an internal drive. Even USB3 us limited by cheap controllers & hard drives and if you can't ensure a consistent speed, things get tricky.
An interesting case for that would be Saints Row 2 for PC. As the game depends heavily on hard-drive speed & caching it's performance can change massively by changing HD or OS. Alternative comparison would be how PC gamers treat their SSDs - for some games (e. g. Total War) that is a day and night difference.
Games for Consoles are traditionally designed to pre-load and work with the much slower Optical Disk Drives (DVD, Blu-Ray, etc).
For next-gen PS4/Xbox1, I guess having hit that performance bottleneck, they have opted to require HDD installation for all games.
In that scenario, those games will likely load faster if you have better HDD in your machine. The PS4 like the PS3 before it will allow you to put in a 2.5" SSD if you really want. For my PS3, I actually have what is called a Hybrid SSD which is part SSD and part 7200 RPM drive and I get both performance and capacity out of that solution for relatively low price. The default drive that these consoles ship for is a cheap and slow 5400 RPM.
I don't need to store 500 GB of game on SSD, just the actively used game code parts while rest can be on the cheaper 7200 RPM part of the drive.
All of that said... for the WIi U, the External USB 2.0 HDD at 5400 or more performance is still better than the internal really slow flash memory they have on it (plus very limited capacity)... which in turn is still better than any optical drive.
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Long story short... don't apply what works well for a PC game to the console world of gaming. The PC developers don't optimize for any hardware configuration and expect reviewers and core gamers to just be using high-end machines for the high-end experience.