Xbox Series X | S

[Clipper]

50 minutes ago, MattyP said:

 

Yep it will be much cheaper to do this and make a more compact unit. We might even get a HDD port to plug another drive in who knows. Be a first for MS to have user upgradable storage.

 

MS did a really good job with the X hope that whatever they do next follows the same path. I'd like to see a much smaller box with no physical drive. 

You can plug a HDD into an Xbox One - or did you mean something else?

 

[MattyP]

17 minutes ago, Clipper said:

You can plug a HDD into an Xbox One - or did you mean something else?

 

 

Ah just meant that you could put the drive inside the unit itself without having to have an external drive dangling around connected to a USB port (which I have on my XBox at the moment).

 

 

[Alex W.]

 

[mushashi]

On 26/04/2019 at 15:57, bear said:

I'm certain Brad Sams mentioned devkits having an NVME SSD on one of his videos. They'll probably end up with the flash storage soldered to the motherboard like we are seeing with laptops now. 

 

How is that a good idea? Flash has a limited lifespan. Making it soldered means you will have a very difficult time replacing it in the future, unless you want something that is less serviceable, like a typical mobile phone which you have to pay for expensive repairs on something as simple as even a battery replacement because they decided to seal it up.

 

Some people are already bitching at the possible idea that Sony might have gone with a special type of solid state storage which makes any replacement of it difficult, soldering bog standard flash is no different to that as a hypothetically consumer unfriendly move.

[Liamness]

We're seeing this already with laptops etc though. Evidently the consumer electronics industry has decided that throwing out the whole board when something breaks is preferable given the cost and weight savings of everything being soldered on there. As long as it's expandable somehow and it's easy to back up your data (Nintendo's approach with the Switch is pretty disgusting but thankfully not the norm) I don't have a problem with it. SSDs are pretty reliable, and technology like wear levelling has made them even more so. You wouldn't think twice about buying a phone or tablet with storage soldered onto the board, and consoles aren't meant to be any more user serviceable really. 

[mushashi]

So because Apple/mobile phones in general and now laptops have planned obsolescence (to make you buy a new one sooner rather than later), people have already waved the white flag and given up on yet another category of consumer electronics going the same way, by the time they get around to desktop PCs, there will be no complaining left to do. Nvidia are starting to make life difficult on that front as a warning of what is to come.

 

The point of moving to Solid State in the new consoles ,the so-called "true game changer" is because you can now redesign games to take advantage of the lack of storage sub-system bottleneck in your fundamental game design. Any external user addition to this will not have the same benefits and will be gimped compared to a user-upgradeable internal storage solution with direct access to the rest of the important hardware and not stuck behind some shit external interface.

[jamesy]

Couldn't they have storage soldered to the board to save costs with an expansion port for optional storage as well? At the minute those nvme ssd sticks are pretty expensive but in 5 years they'll have come down a lot in price like everything else.

[footle]

40 minutes ago, mushashi said:

So because Apple/mobile phones in general and now laptops have planned obsolescence (to make you buy a new one sooner rather than later), people have already waved the white flag and given up on yet another category of consumer electronics going the same way, by the time they get around to desktop PCs, there will be no complaining left to do. Nvidia are starting to make life difficult on that front as a warning of what is to come.

 

The point of moving to Solid State in the new consoles ,the so-called "true game changer" is because you can now redesign games to take advantage of the lack of storage sub-system bottleneck in your fundamental game design. Any external user addition to this will not have the same benefits and will be gimped compared to a user-upgradeable internal storage solution with direct access to the rest of the important hardware and not stuck behind some shit external interface.

 

Console internal storage has been non-user upgradable outside of the PS4/PS3 for decades; and also something pretty much pointless for performance because it was heavily limited by the onboard controller. An external interface making use of USB3 will be plenty fast enough: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3034714/samsung-t3-review-this-usb-31-drive-is-stupidly-fast.html

[monkeydog]

The lifespan concern is a bit overblown for modern NAND chips with the amount of Storage we're looking st.

[Liamness]

SSDs will usually last for decades even under extremely heavy usage. Given that, it is almost a given that something else on the console will fail irreparably before the storage does. So it's difficult to see this as a case of "planned obsolescence".

 

23 minutes ago, jamesy said:

Couldn't they have storage soldered to the board to save costs with an expansion port for optional storage as well? At the minute those nvme ssd sticks are pretty expensive but in 5 years they'll have come down a lot in price like everything else.

 

The PS4 and Bone already support external storage, I don't see why they would remove this from one generation to the next - particularly with the possibility that their competitor will keep the feature.

[mushashi]

16 minutes ago, footle said:

 

Console internal storage has been non-user upgradable outside of the PS4/PS3 for decades; and also something pretty much pointless for performance because it was heavily limited by the onboard controller. An external interface making use of USB3 will be plenty fast enough: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3034714/samsung-t3-review-this-usb-31-drive-is-stupidly-fast.html

 

You are talking about the known past, the exciting future promised by Mark Cerny is a much different beast. Prior storage sub-systems used in consoles, whether they be modern cartridges with their loading times, dog slow optical drives with latency you can feel or slow mechanical hard drives with crap IOPs isn't going to compare to the promised nirvana of whatever Sony are going to be using in the PS5. The specs he alluded to in the Wired article means it would be utterly gimped by a USB interface of any sort, even poxy Thunderbolt would gimp whatever is in the PS5 as it has faster bandwidth than any current available PC drive.

 

The PS2 had user upgradeable storage too, and that was internal to boot, while the X360 was external, even for the official drive, but it wasn't connected via shitty USB.

 

 

The drive in that review only manages a slow ass ~420MB/s read, which compared to the 4 figure number touted by Mark Cerny just shows how gimpy USB would be compared to internal storage for Next Gen, and even the latest NVMe enclosures don't improve things that much as USB is fundamentally too slow for a true Next Gen interface. Thunderbolt is an improvement, but still gimped compared to internal.

[mushashi]

1 minute ago, Liamness said:

SSDs will usually last for decades even under extremely heavy usage. Given that, it is almost a given that something else on the console will fail irreparably before the storage does. So it's difficult to see this as a case of "planned obsolescence".

 

People have already had SSDs fail, and they haven't even been around for decades for anybody to claim they will last that long in the first place.

[monkeydog]

22 minutes ago, mushashi said:

 

The drive in that review only manages a slow ass ~420MB/s read, which compared to the 4 figure number touted by Mark Cerny just shows how gimpy USB would be compared to internal storage for Next Gen, and even the latest NVMe enclosures don't improve things that much as USB is fundamentally too slow for a true Next Gen interface. Thunderbolt is an improvement, but still gimped compared to internal.

They might have custom stuff going on, but all Cerny's described/demoed so far is equivalent to NVMe using PCIe 4.0.  That'll be 2Gb/s + when it arrives on PC later this year.

 

(It's enough bandwidth to go from 15 seconds to 0.8 in the Spiderman demo)

 

User upgraded storage via NVMe should do the job, if they're not already planning for the SSD to be a cache for a harddrive anyway.

 

[footle]

20 minutes ago, mushashi said:

 

People have already had SSDs fail, and they haven't even been around for decades for anybody to claim they will last that long in the first place.

 

Whereas no-one has EVER had a games console fail on them, have they?

[Liamness]

@footle exactly. I think a lot of people got burned by the first wave of SSDs where the hardware had a way to go still, and the software wasn't really there at all. 

 

I'm expecting a couple of USB-C shaped interconnects on both of the next gen consoles, front and back. It would be great if they supported USB 4 / Thunderbolt 3 (which should be plenty fast for external storage, and overkill for anything disk-based), and even better if they supported VirtualLink. I'm really hoping we can move past the situation where there are separate VR platforms with their own headsets, and I can just buy a Vive or an Oculus and use it with whatever.

[Petrousgyre]

48 minutes ago, mushashi said:

People have already had SSDs fail, and they haven't even been around for decades for anybody to claim they will last that long in the first place.

 

SSD's have been around for nearly 30 years. Early SSD's had terrible reliability issues but nowadays with TRIM and so forth are generally considered at least as reliable as HDD's.

[layten]

On 20/04/2019 at 08:01, Black Cat Supremacist said:

 

Both are using the same AMD components so you’d presume it’ll be difficult for one to be that much more advanced than the other.

Are they?

 

Anyway, it's not as if AMD have a bunch of GPU's all performing differently whilst still using the same base architecture.

[monkeydog]

9 hours ago, petrolgirls said:

 

SSD's have been around for nearly 30 years. Early SSD's had terrible reliability issues but nowadays with TRIM and so forth are generally considered at least as reliable as HDD's.

 

If they were that reliable we'd see them being used in datacenters ....oh! 

[T Pot]

1 hour ago, monkeydog said:

 

If they were that reliable we'd see them being used in datacenters ....oh! 

 

They often are. At work We regularly configure and ship rack mount servers and storage arrays with SSDs. The problem with enterprise SSDs is that they are expensive, very expensive. They're reliable as hell, but you'll easily be paying over £300-400 per 1TB drive.

[monkeydog]

50 minutes ago, Mr Tony said:

 

They often are. At work We regularly configure and ship rack mount servers and storage arrays with SSDs. The problem with enterprise SSDs is that they are expensive, very expensive. They're reliable as hell, but you'll easily be paying over £300-400 per 1TB drive.

 

Yeah, was being sarcastic. 

 

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the only reason solid state isn't used almost  everywhere is just down to cost these days.

 

The price of NAND chips is expect to drop double digit % every quarter this year.  That doesn't necessarily translate into a cost drop for drives straight away, but it does make SSD's more cost-effective in 2020 next gen than you'd think looking at today's market.

[T Pot]

15 minutes ago, monkeydog said:

 

Yeah, was being sarcastic. 

 

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the only reason solid state isn't used almost  everywhere is just down to cost these days.

 

The price of NAND chips is expect to drop double digit % every quarter this year.  That doesn't necessarily translate into a cost drop for drives straight away, but it does make SSD's more cost-effective in 2020 next gen than you'd think looking at today's market.

 

 That's what I get for reading the latest posts first thing after waking up!

 

I could fully believe that SSDs will be default next gen. The past 12 months prices have crashed. It was only 2 years ago that a 1TB Consumer SSD would skin you £180-£280 depending on brand. You can now pick up decent Crucial, Kingston and Samsung drives for £90-£120. Give it another 12-18 Months and I think you'll be looking at the sub £80 point for main brands and sub £50 for budgets.

[V3zna]

12 hours ago, PC Master Race said:

Are they?

 

Anyway, it's not as if AMD have a bunch of GPU's all performing differently whilst still using the same base architecture.

 

It’s certainly a reasonable theory. It would be a surprise if both aren’t using some form of Ryzen (Zen 2) and Navi. 

[mushashi]

On 27/04/2019 at 20:58, petrolgirls said:

 

SSD's have been around for nearly 30 years. Early SSD's had terrible reliability issues but nowadays with TRIM and so forth are generally considered at least as reliable as HDD's.

 

As far as consumer drives are concerned, they are barely much older than a decade. They are more reliable than HDDs in general, but they can and do still fail. How does the Xbox One work after failure of the internal, non user serviceable drive? As you can DIY it to some extent at present from what I understand but if you go the soldered route, even that becomes practically impossible for 99.9999% of people.

 

 

On 28/04/2019 at 09:21, Mr Tony said:

 

 That's what I get for reading the latest posts first thing after waking up!

 

I could fully believe that SSDs will be default next gen. The past 12 months prices have crashed. It was only 2 years ago that a 1TB Consumer SSD would skin you £180-£280 depending on brand. You can now pick up decent Crucial, Kingston and Samsung drives for £90-£120. Give it another 12-18 Months and I think you'll be looking at the sub £80 point for main brands and sub £50 for budgets.

 

The manufacturers have announced counter measures to avoid that situation, 3 of the majors have announced price protection strategies recently and Samsung is likely to join them. Prices have fallen due to a glut of supply versus unexpected falling demand, so they'll just cut supply of the commodity.

[Petrousgyre]

13 minutes ago, mushashi said:

They are more reliable than HDDs in general, but they can and do still fail. How does the Xbox One work after failure of the  internal, non user serviceable drive?

 

Same way as it does with the failure of the motherboard, SoC, PSU, RAM or any other internal, non user serviceable part. It's much less likely to be the SSD that fails though so it's unclear to me why this should be a significant issue. When did you last hear of someones phone storage crapping out? 

[TehStu]

My 2012 Nexus 7, binned it shortly after a year. $250. I had some choice words for their technical support. Old example, I don't think that would be common these days. Your phone's battery will become useless before everything else, all things being equal, I suspect.

 

My launch PS4's hdd died, sent it back and I had a whole new (or refurbished, unsure) unit. Do they even bother swapping bits out when they fail, or would they just shove a new board in there if the soldered on storage goes, now?

[Alex W.]

Even if it’s bespoke surely it’s likely to be on some sort of daughterboard so they don’t have to do a whole new board for different capacities.

[EvilBoris]

2 hours ago, petrolgirls said:

 

Same way as it does with the failure of the motherboard, SoC, PSU, RAM or any other internal, non user serviceable part. It's much less likely to be the SSD that fails though so it's unclear to me why this should be a significant issue. When did you last hear of someones phone storage crapping out? 

 

The current Xbox has 8GB of flash storage, has that been a known source of hardware failure?

[mushashi]

22 hours ago, petrolgirls said:

 

Same way as it does with the failure of the motherboard, SoC, PSU, RAM or any other internal, non user serviceable part. It's much less likely to be the SSD that fails though so it's unclear to me why this should be a significant issue. When did you last hear of someones phone storage crapping out? 

 

How many people use the same phone for a decade or more?, or expect to at some point in the future be able to buy a retro console that still works?

 

Older consoles had this problem in the form of the fail-tastic optical drive, I've had both an otherwise working PS2 and Xbox rendered useless because the fucking storage sub-system decided to become intermittent. If those were replaceable, you wouldn't have this problem. Luckily, there is a backdoor for both of those machines to get them working again.

 

Even if you don't give two shits about your consumer rights, the unnecessary mountains of e-waste we are now beginning to generate from our addiction to buying ever more consumer electronics that become useless due to designed planned obsolescence that could otherwise be avoided should be reason enough not to cheer on the practice.

[TehStu]

Server blades and streaming, if e-waste is a concern. I think knackered Scarlett SSD boards are going to be a drop in the ocean compared to all the other shit we buy, mind. How about we all get off the annual phone revision train, for example.

 

NARRATOR: but they didn't, they liked their moderately newer phones each year.

[bear]

People sure got worked up over a throwaway comment by someone who has absolutely nothing to do with designing the new Xbox.