The first Xbox Series S/X 1TB storage expansion card costs $220
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Because it's a bog standard technology that most people don't need explained to them, on a device that's not being released for two more months.
Inline, line-speed data compression has been commonplace in datacenter storage for a decade, running at speeds way faster than the storage in an Xbox. It's not novel or unusual.
They've released their specs on how the integrated storage system (which includes compression) will perform. There's no more reason to question that throughput than to question the speed of the CPU or the RAM bandwidth.
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Just saying that subscription based game ownership brings a completely different scenario than the old console game attach rates when counting how much data is written onto the hard drives.
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I'd agree with you about the number of games played were it not for Game Pass. Microsoft is leaning heavily on the buffet model. As for the matter of QLC, its cheap, slow, and thus shouldn't have a hefty premium attached to it regardless of form factor.
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What part of this is console wars lol. Both systems are gonna have expensive ass storage. I'm mostly on PS/Switch/PC at this point since Xbox doesn't offer anything I want on it when everything is going to PC.
This is just about the storage being so damn expensive for the HEAVY push of the netflix model of all you can play for a subscription.
Out of that list of games, I definitely wouldn't have bought plague tail, battlefleet Armada 2 (or the first one that left gamepass a few moths ago), or a bunch of the other games on there normally.
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Low end PCIe 3.0 drives are 2Gpbs, which isn't as fast as this. You'd have to spend more like $130-$150 for a drive this speed.
And that's still a 3.0 drive - PCIe 4.0 controllers still cost more - even with only 2 lanes.
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Snarky Robot
Ars Legatus Legionis
I mean...maybe? I honestly don't think anyone who is buying enough games to run out of space is going to also be so inept they can't handle it. I believe that a warning pops up when you try to install too much, which will allow even the most tech-averse to take some action . But I also suspect that the people who need this (or an external where they want to archive things) will be the people who can both set this up and afford internet sufficient to handle downloads.
Many people will be able to use discs for large chunks of the game, and only rely on downloads for updates. Still a lot, but there are multiple solutions for people in differing situations.
For me...yeah, I'll use my existing externals as my archive. This is $220 of minor convenience and I'm cool without it.
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Data caps notwithstanding, what’s the fascination with having literally every game you own installed in your system at the same time? I guess I’ll buy that if you buy disc-less versions of everything, you may want to keep copies of things you download as a hedge against those things suddenly not being available for download anymore. In that case, why not just buy a USB hard drive and plug it in? I haven’t found shuttling things between my XBox One’s slow internal drive and the much faster third party external USB 3.0 SSD I got for it to be too much of a hardship. Sure, not being able to jump into the game I want to play this exact second does take a bit off the dopamine hit, but it’s not like I have to wait *that* long for my brain opiates.
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faustshausuk
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Not really: you can get the Xbox Series S, play every game, and be a bit more hands on with storage space for $25/month inc. all you can eat from Game Pass.
These optional external drives are more about convenience, and not having one doesn’t exclude you at all!
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The irony is that he isn't even making a direct console wars argument. He's complaining about how a 1TB disk can be filled while completely sidestepping the point that this doesn't change the fact that one does not require a separate storage purchase to use the system.
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The comparison later on is the only comparison you should make. Anything else is disingenuous. Comparing a fast, non-SATA (somewhat proprietary) SSD to a spinning hard drive for price comparison is useless. And if you want to compare to a spinning hard drive because that was good enough for the Xbone and PS4, explicitly state what you're trying to get across - why keep your comparison implicit and confuse people not bleeding-edge-up-to-date on the latest storage tech? The USB SSD pricing is plenty disingenuous as well.
All you need to say is, "The older, cheaper storage solutions aren't fast enough for the new, expensive generation. A good same-speed-to-xboxx2 M.2 SSD runs like $140, so there's a $80 premium to make it have a special connector. The PS5 goes faster and an equivalent drive is about $230 (Samsung 980 PRO 1 TB) since all other drives on the market are currently slower than the SSD the PS5 ships with and Sony probably won't whitelist them for compatibility."
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That actually seems super cheap to me! But I suppose that makes sense. Given that one of the most expensive components of the console will be it's sizeable cutting-edge SSD, they were faced with the dilemma of not being able to mark it up like they usually would an accessory. If they did, it'd be the cost of a second console.
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Don’t forget Mr. “this tweet means there is exactly 40 bad apples at Tesla and Elon is going to fire exactly 40 people” And the follow up article “It was not a figure of speech despite the context clues, Musk himself clarifying and everyone else but me not reading it that way”.This is Cyrus Farivar levels of doubling down on something after being called out.
I think it should be clear that the equivalent technology MS is employing is roughly the same cost within the same context (paragraph). Instead, the article starts off comparing disparate technologies as if we should expect this thing to be similar in cost for current external drives. Instead we have to infer that the same tech that the PS5 will require means the cost of the MS drive isn't really that expensive, considering.
1TB of storage is 1TB of storage, and customers are used to a certain price for that amount of storage. The Series S/X add-on storage is faster but also costs more.
I think in the context of the entire article this is abundantly clear.
LOL Mr. "yes somebody knows my password since they mailed it to me. BUT........they don't know what account I'm using it for so it's totally secure!"
Man I forgot that one.
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faustshausuk
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I like to keep certain perennial favourites around to dip in and out of as I see fit, then download the latest releases. I still have a 500GB PS4, and I juggle a lot right now - especially with certain bigger AAA games.
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Thanks. I actually forgot I looked into this back when, but the adapters were pretty flaky at the time.
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I think some people jump around with what they play, or perhaps share a console with family/roommates, so theres different profiles, with different games, etc. I still am always blown away when people have dozens of games installed on their PC at once. Ive never had a computer with more than 500gb of storage, and Ive never come close to filling it. But different strokes for different blokes.
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It's still an apples to oranges comparison and around $200 is about the same as you'd find buying 1TB in the open standard M.2 NVMe standard, implying that proprietary tech has little to do with this price. You drew a false conclusion.
I mean, I generally hate proprietary storage bus standards but the claim that proprietary tech is responsible for pricing here just isn't supported.
Following up, the comparison between 2012 storage standard prices and 2020 storage standard prices are certainly interesting, but it's not very useful to make that comparison but neglect to mention the exponential speed increase and in this specific case that fuller comparison wasn't clearly made.
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I guess. I just wonder how many games even a typical sized family is going to be playing at once. The systems come with 1TB of storage, don’t they? If we go assume a typical game is 50GB, and we leave 50GB for system files and all the other overhead, you can put nineteen games on there! Even if you’ve got five players in the family that all share the same console, that’s almost four games apiece, all at once! I don’t know how you’re even going to find enough time in the day for that many people to play that many games at once.
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Depending on how you calculate it, a TB of storage in a Mac costs $400 to $600 (taking a system from 1TB to 2TB, analogous to upgrading the Xbox Series X, is $400).
So, you know, things could be worse. Especially since you can do the upgrade after the initial purchase.
So, you know, things could be worse. Especially since you can do the upgrade after the initial purchase.
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Keep in mind that's for the Series X. The online-only Series S will have half of that space, and now we're learning that the only option to upgrade that storage will cost nearly as much as the console itself? I understand the pricing, but I think it's hard to deny that that makes the package a little less attractive. If I can no longer just swap a disc out to play a game from my catalog, I'd certainly appreciate being able to store more than 5 games at once without having to decide what I want to remove so I can queue up a new download and wait to play. Even as someone at least blessed enough not to have bandwidth caps or rate limiting that certainly makes me take another look at spending an extra $100 on a PS5 DE instead--especially if it'll have a wider array of non-proprietary options for expansion.
Edit: AND this is only if game sizes don't continue to bloat past 80 GB...
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That's effectively a "ROM Cart", that goes through the game card slot, not the memory card slot. Sadly there doesn't seem to be any actual memory card replacements for the Vita.
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I think this blog post on the DirectStorage API in Windows 10 is informative for the design of these Xbox expansion cards.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/ ... ing-to-pc/
Based on reading this, it sounds like the Xbox Series S|X storage controller is optimized for random reads and higher queue depths to maximize IOPS rather than raw sequential read speed. They're taking a more holistic approach to reading game assets from disk, from access patterns in the abstract to hardware implementations. So the argument that "I found this 1TB SSD on NewEgg for $175" probably doesn't stand scrutiny on sequential read speed alone.
This might also be why Sony has a certification process for off-the-shelf NVMe 4.0 SSDs rather than allowing just any old M.2 drive to be installed. They might have arrived at the same access optimization (even without a clever brand name like Velocity Architecture) and thus have the same random read and IOPS requirements.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/ ... ing-to-pc/
Based on reading this, it sounds like the Xbox Series S|X storage controller is optimized for random reads and higher queue depths to maximize IOPS rather than raw sequential read speed. They're taking a more holistic approach to reading game assets from disk, from access patterns in the abstract to hardware implementations. So the argument that "I found this 1TB SSD on NewEgg for $175" probably doesn't stand scrutiny on sequential read speed alone.
This might also be why Sony has a certification process for off-the-shelf NVMe 4.0 SSDs rather than allowing just any old M.2 drive to be installed. They might have arrived at the same access optimization (even without a clever brand name like Velocity Architecture) and thus have the same random read and IOPS requirements.
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I think games will generation will probably be a bit larger, due to graphics increases and higher textures, etc. So lets imagine perhaps 120gb game size. (current gen COD is 230gb! but also seems to be an outlier). That gives you around 8-9 games. I think thats reasonable, and then expansion for those who need. But really we wont know until next gen games start to launch, and we see exactly how large they are. The option to expand, even if its unneeded is still nice to have.
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Is Sony's expansion additive or a replacement? IE is there a separate bay with 4 separate lanes waiting for an expansion or is it like swapping the hard drive to a bigger one in an older playstation?
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Game Pass certainly gives access to more titles, but are people actually downloading and playing everything as it's becoming available? Even then I still don't think it invalidates my argument if you look at numbers.
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As do I. Honestly, most of the things I keep on my system only because there’s room for them. I guess I don’t understand why anybody would jump around between huge games often enough where they’re going to exhaust all the available space for all the things they’re playing right now.
Maybe my perception is skewed because I can’t stand playing games online with people I don’t know, so multiplayer isn’t interesting to me.
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steelcobra
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
The Seagate Firecuda 520 1TB PCIe 4.0 drive currently goes for $220-250.
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$220 for 1TB of PCIe Gen 4 SSD, even on two channels, is fine (the whole two-channel drives being significantly cheaper never panned out for m.2). Already pre-ordered two of the drives for the two Series consoles I managed to pre-order.
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I agree that the option definitely should be there. But, it’s not like other, cheaper external storage won’t be available. You just won’t be able to play games directly from it, at least if I remember what I read correctly. The people who somehow can’t survive without the extra space can get it. I can’t really say that I’ll be able to sympathize them if it’s a bit more expensive for them to do it, given the amount of money they had to sink to get that many games and my perception that they really ought to be focusing on fewer things at a time.
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Not only it's optional. But you could also expand the storage with a normal external hard drive, and move things around when you want to play that 10th AAA game. You are paying extra for the convenience of not having to move write 80gb to an external hard drive, and then having to read 80gb when you want to play that 10th game.
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I currently have a total of 12TB of storage in my PS4 (2TB internal, 10TB external), simply because I didn't want to have to plan ahead what I'm playing. Having to wait a couple of hours for a download to complete really puts a dampener on things. If the next gen consoles can copy in games to fast storage in a couple of minutes that's still tolerable, even if not ideal.
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steelcobra
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Also of note: Dell has made drive imaging/cloning a pain in the ass on recent machines with NVMe main drives, easier just to do a full reimage of the machine.
Have a one-off that I'm trying to upgrade from 128 to 500, and Clonezilla can't even see any drives mounted in the M.2 slot, I had to put both in a dual USB enclosure, and the copy still failed out for no good reason.
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I think it should be clear that the equivalent technology MS is employing is roughly the same cost within the same context (paragraph). Instead, the article starts off comparing disparate technologies as if we should expect this thing to be similar in cost for current external drives. Instead we have to infer that the same tech that the PS5 will require means the cost of the MS drive isn't really that expensive, considering.
1TB of storage is 1TB of storage, and customers are used to a certain price for that amount of storage, especially when it comes to console add-ons. The Series S/X add-on storage is faster but also costs more.
I think in the context of the entire article this is abundantly clear. Apologies if you did not find it so.
Except as a journalist for a technical publication, you should be able to recognize that the technologies used to provide those 1TB have different costs and benefits. As such, you should take the opportunity to report on _why_ that 1TB is so much more expensive than the other 1TB. As well as how that extra expense is not excessive when considering the technology involved.
But you haven't opted to do that. You have opted to make it seem like they have priced this thing in the stratosphere for no reason other than "gimme the monies!"
edit: typo
I don't think they priced for any reason other than "gimme the monies," but I do believed they developed this "proprietary" solid state storage for the purpose of "gimme the monies." Seems like Microsoft hired someone over from Apple to work on this.
I would, however, be very interested in the analysis you suggest in your first paragraph. I'd wager that the benefits to the consumer are minimal and that a cheaper, traditional, nonproprietary form of SSD would work just fine. If that would indeed turn out to be the case, then we could surmise with some confidence that "gimme the monies" is motivating factor here.
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That’s a lot of storage! Well, right now. That said, how long does it take to copy a thing from that external storage to the internal storage? Surely less than downloading it again.
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I think it should be clear that the equivalent technology MS is employing is roughly the same cost within the same context (paragraph). Instead, the article starts off comparing disparate technologies as if we should expect this thing to be similar in cost for current external drives. Instead we have to infer that the same tech that the PS5 will require means the cost of the MS drive isn't really that expensive, considering.
1TB of storage is 1TB of storage, and customers are used to a certain price for that amount of storage, especially when it comes to console add-ons. The Series S/X add-on storage is faster but also costs more.
I think in the context of the entire article this is abundantly clear. Apologies if you did not find it so.
Except as a journalist for a technical publication, you should be able to recognize that the technologies used to provide those 1TB have different costs and benefits. As such, you should take the opportunity to report on _why_ that 1TB is so much more expensive than the other 1TB. As well as how that extra expense is not excessive when considering the technology involved.
But you haven't opted to do that. You have opted to make it seem like they have priced this thing in the stratosphere for no reason other than "gimme the monies!"
edit: typo
I don't think they priced for any reason other than "gimme the monies," but I do believed they developed this "proprietary" solid state storage for the purpose of "gimme the monies." Seems like Microsoft hired someone over from Apple to work on this.
I would, however, be very interested in the analysis you suggest in your first paragraph. I'd wager that the benefits to the consumer are minimal and that a cheaper, traditional, nonproprietary form of SSD would work just fine. If that would indeed turn out to be the case, then we could surmise with some confidence that "gimme the monies" is motivating factor here.
Advantages to the consumer: 1. They don't have to crack open their xbox to get more storage. 2. some random kid (grandma, etc.) can plug this in and doesn't have to worry about killing a multi-hundred dollar drive by plugging it in wrong.
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Expansion bay.
The Series X/S have a soldered on and shielded primary SSD, which they have shown since March. Sony has been very secretive on sharing the innards of the PS5. But based on their tech breakdown imagery used, the assumption is the primary SSD is also soldered on.
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steelcobra
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
There is no "non-proprietary" hot swap interface for NVMe that doesn't sacrifice its performance. There's a handful of drive bay units out there, but there's no non-USB option for hot-swapping a drive with PCIe 4.0 speeds.
I think it should be clear that the equivalent technology MS is employing is roughly the same cost within the same context (paragraph). Instead, the article starts off comparing disparate technologies as if we should expect this thing to be similar in cost for current external drives. Instead we have to infer that the same tech that the PS5 will require means the cost of the MS drive isn't really that expensive, considering.
1TB of storage is 1TB of storage, and customers are used to a certain price for that amount of storage, especially when it comes to console add-ons. The Series S/X add-on storage is faster but also costs more.
I think in the context of the entire article this is abundantly clear. Apologies if you did not find it so.
Except as a journalist for a technical publication, you should be able to recognize that the technologies used to provide those 1TB have different costs and benefits. As such, you should take the opportunity to report on _why_ that 1TB is so much more expensive than the other 1TB. As well as how that extra expense is not excessive when considering the technology involved.
But you haven't opted to do that. You have opted to make it seem like they have priced this thing in the stratosphere for no reason other than "gimme the monies!"
edit: typo
I don't think they priced for any reason other than "gimme the monies," but I do believed they developed this "proprietary" solid state storage for the purpose of "gimme the monies." Seems like Microsoft hired someone over from Apple to work on this.
I would, however, be very interested in the analysis you suggest in your first paragraph. I'd wager that the benefits to the consumer are minimal and that a cheaper, traditional, nonproprietary form of SSD would work just fine. If that would indeed turn out to be the case, then we could surmise with some confidence that "gimme the monies" is motivating factor here.
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