General Discussion

[Berzerker793]

Remembered reading this a couple of months back, thought it might interest you 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-can-ssd-upgrades-boost-ps3-performance

Its quite a bit of a read but if you've got half an hour to spare theres some good info on SSD's and the PS3's HDD in general.

[zinep]

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fenian wrote:

SSD will generate little to no heat compared to normal hard drive, no moving parts, and is twice as fast as a 7200rpm hard drive at least.

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Perhaps not very relevant in the PS3, as I haven't seen many cases of PS3 users having harddrive crashes, but the SSD's have epic MTBF (mean time before failure) as well. (Note though that it's a mean time).

But it's sort of reassuring that if you buy an SSD for your PS3, you'll be able to format and reuse that drive in the PS4, PS5, PS6, ... provided we get those, and they use the same interface. (Or just stick it in your PC once you're done with it in your PS3/PS4/whatever). Though they are more expensive per GB, they are probably much cheaper per time unit (even though such a measurement isn't very interesting on a day-to-day basis).

In case anyone is interested to see the wear and tear of an SLC and an MLC SSD which have been in heavy use over the past few years, let me know and I'll post a SMART[*] dump.

Out of curiosity, I too have read that SSD's don't give much performance gain over the regular harddrive in a PS3. And does the PS3 ship with a 5400 RPM drive? Then I wonder, would a 7200 RPM drive yield any performance improvements over a 5400 RPM drive? (just wondering where the bottleneck is).

[*] For those who haven't encountered SMART, it's a system which is designed to be able to report the status of harddrives. SMART just happened to be excellent for SSD, since it can keep erase cycle[**] writes counters and expose them through the SMART interface.

[**] These are essentially what wear SSD's down. When SSD's came, these were what fear mongers raved about. As I can show you, there really isn't much to complain about.

[fenian]

I'm not sure if all ps3s come with below 7200 hdds, but the 40 and 60gigs did.

As far as I understand 7200 offers a slight bump over the normal hard drive, with not much added extra cost (so is worth it). SSD will over the same slight bump over 7200 not all the time but in some situations but at a considerable cost and this is why its not worth it.

Its not like in a pc where there are considerable gains to be had, where an ssd can almost function as fast as ram in some cases, knocking tens of seconds of boot times and opening apps in a lot faster time too.

I really dont know why it wont vastly improve the ps3 load times etc, maybe security features? Id just be guessing wildly. I agree with you zinep, it should work a lot better in the ps4, very good point and worth taking into consideration. I also agree with you that ssd are epic for a lot of uses, specially with the mtbf.

Have you used ssds a lot? consumer level? just wondering on lifespan, its always been a concern of mine.

[Cimbrer]

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zinep wrote:

Out of curiosity, I too have read that SSD's don't give much performance gain over the regular harddrive in a PS3. And does the PS3 ship with a 5400 RPM drive? Then I wonder, would a 7200 RPM drive yield any performance improvements over a 5400 RPM drive? (just wondering where the bottleneck is).

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All models of PlayStation 3 ships with a 5400 RPM HDD. Looking around the web, I found some data about the different models, looks like they vary in transfer speed. Some of them are at 42 Mb/s and the later models ship with a HDD that has a speed of 300 Mb/s. The controller in the PlayStation 3 has a transfer speed of 1.5 Gb/s So, the bottleneck must be the HDD. 

[zinep]

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fenian wrote:

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Have you used ssds a lot? consumer level? just wondering on lifespan, its always been a concern of mine.

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Many years ago I had a harddrive crash in which I lost a lot of very precious files/projects. (And I only had old and partial backups). Since then I've been a little on the extreme side with backups and trying to increase the reliability of my persistent storage.

This interest in reliability led to me to start using SSD's somewhat early, so over the past few years I've started using plenty of SSD's on servers, laptops and workstations, with mixed SLC and MLC.

Let me just note that I got a very early 16GB SLC, which was definitely faster than my spinning platter disks, but it was nothing compared to the Intel-SSD's I got later. So during the time I've used SSD's, things have moved on a lot.

As for reliability; this is an output from the system I'm using right now:

gauss# atactl /dev/wd0 smart status
SMART supported, SMART enabled
id value thresh crit collect reliability description                    raw
  3 100    0     no  offline positive    Spin-up time                   0
  4 100    0     no  offline positive    Start/stop count               0
  5 100    0     no  online  positive    Reallocated sector count       0
  9 100    0     no  online  positive    Power-on hours count           24917
 12 100    0     no  online  positive    Device power cycle count       291
192 100    0     no  online  positive    Power-off retract count        145
225 200    0     no  offline positive    Load/unload cycle count        203058
232 100   10     yes online  positive    Unknown                        0
233  99    0     no  online  positive    Unknown                        0
gauss# atactl /dev/wd1 smart status
SMART supported, SMART enabled
id value thresh crit collect reliability description                    raw
  3 100    0     no  offline positive    Spin-up time                   0
  4 100    0     no  offline positive    Start/stop count               0
  5 100    0     no  online  positive    Reallocated sector count       0
  9 100    0     no  online  positive    Power-on hours count           24056
 12 100    0     no  online  positive    Device power cycle count       160
192 100    0     no  online  positive    Power-off retract count        129
232 100   10     yes online  positive    Unknown                        0
233  91    0     no  online  positive    Unknown                        0

As you can see here, the values of id 9 and 232 (correlated) are the important ones (though not only those, see next paragraph) with regards to reliability.

Though it's important to note that I have subjected both these disks to torture. After having them a month or so, I decided to do some tests, and I set up a loop which unpacked pkgsrc.tar (google it if you care, but it doesn't matter -- you just need to know that it's huge and contains a gazillion small files (which is optimally bad for SSD under the "right" conditions), and I'm using a filesystem which isn't optimized for flash drives), and then removed the files. Rinse and repeat. Under that torture period I did several months worth of damage under just two days.

Add to that that I have built my entire OS (kernel + userland), over and over in various test-builds and such on the MLC drive. This is also far above average "regular use wear".

Given all the data (power-on hours, and the torture), you can see that my drives are doing quite well.

Just as a side note, the SLC drive has a documented MTBF of 2M hours, and the MLC drive 1.2M hours. (Obviously those numbers are based on research on the flash memories themselves, and not actual experience..). Even with an error margin of +-50%, such disks are likely to outlive a PS3, and completely blow spinning-platter disks out of the water with regards to reliability. In fact, we're starting to look at problems along the line of "What do you mean no one uses SATA any more?! I've had this disk since I was 12! Damn you kids and your new-fangled technology!".

There's a lot one can argue about the SMART numbers not being reliable, etc. But at the same time, the companies who make SSD have an incentive not to get those numbers too far off, so while I don't trust those MTBF-numbers to the letter, I do think SSD's are more reliable than spinning-platter disks by orders of magnitude.

Time will tell if I'm right.

[zinep]

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Cimbrer wrote:

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zinep wrote:

Out of curiosity, I too have read that SSD's don't give much performance gain over the regular harddrive in a PS3. And does the PS3 ship with a 5400 RPM drive? Then I wonder, would a 7200 RPM drive yield any performance improvements over a 5400 RPM drive? (just wondering where the bottleneck is).

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All models of PlayStation 3 ships with a 5400 RPM HDD. Looking around the web, I found some data about the different models, looks like they vary in transfer speed. Some of them are at 42 Mb/s and the later models ship with a HDD that has a speed of 300 Mb/s. The controller in the PlayStation 3 has a transfer speed of 1.5 Gb/s So, the bottleneck must be the HDD. 

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Kudos for the info.

Given this information, I'm surprised by the results testers are getting from putting SSD's in their PS3's. I've been meaning get an SSD for my PS3 for a long time, but I've been waiting for an SLC of sufficient size. Since that's not likely to happen any time soon, and my experience with MLC is that they are (by far) reliable enough, I may go for an MLC instead.

I doubt Sony could be convinced to allow SMART data to be shown under the system information, but it would be nice to see how the harddrives are "feeling". Perhaps I'll try running it for a few months, then put it in my PC and see if the PS3 is exceptionally unkind to SSD's or something.

[KrazyFace]

Since any HDD (or even SSD) you stick into a PS3 gets "married" to the machine, I can't imagine there's any difference in which one you use since you can't transfer that data into a new PS3 unless you had another PS3 with the GB to match the original drive then do a link up. Unless there's a way to reach into SSDs via PCs that you can't do with normal HDDs after say, the death of a console, there's still little reason to pick an SSD over HDD for PS3. And 5400 is about fine for PS3, it won't go any faster really, anything more will (as has been said already) put the machine at risk.

[ProjectVRD]

I tried my SSD in the PS3. I just backed up the drive in the PC using Ghost, then slug it into the PS3. It formated pretty quickly but GT5 still took ages to load the track and I didn't notice any difference, but I didn't time it.

The SSD is back in my PC where it can perform to spec. I hope there is no bottleneck as big as this one in the next generation of consoles.

[wellb_b]

Read the article

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-can-ssd-upgrades-boost-ps3-performance

And very interesting reading it is. It looks to me that the only reason it is not worth the upgrade is the cost. They say £1 per gig. At the moment it is about 50p per gig and it states to get a second-hand old one as the new tech will not be used in the PS3. So the upgrade might not be expencive at all. The Rage demonstration is superb. I loved the game. The pop in was anoying and I would play this game again just to see it in its gloy. There will be a lot of games that benefit these kinds of gains. Increased load times and install times. Significant improvments. I think I will shop about on ebay see what there is.

But I still need help from you guys. Are they a direct fit/replacment for the 2.5? Have a look on ebay, are there any you could suggest?

Thanks for all the info, much appreciated.

[ProjectVRD]

They are a direct replacement because they are SATA-II or SATA-III even, the SATA-III's will work with a SATA-II interface which is what PS3 has. They even have the screw holes in the same place as non-SSD 2.5" drives.

I have an Intel-X25, I like it. Not too expensive.