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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

One really good example of an Xbox One game that has grown to truly bloated proportions is Destiny 2. The loading times are multiple minutes per map section now. Total game is about 105GB on disk.

People have even resorted to using external 256GB SATA3 SSDs in USB3.0 enclosures, which are faster than the internal 5400 rpm HDD in an Xbox One S.

I do think we will still see a lot of people connecting USB3.0/USB3.1 external spinning drives to their new-generation consoles. 1TB of SSD space is enough for maybe 12 or 14 games, maximum. "Serious" console gaming people buy many more games than that...

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There's absolutely no excuse for why a console released in 2016 still had 5400 rpm spinning rust. Those drives are barely usable in low-end laptops, and you're trying to run games from it?

Seagate stopped making 7200 rpm 2.5" HDDs in 2013 [1]. I assume Microsoft didn't want to pay more for a 7200 rpm 2.5" WD Black HDD so that leaves 5400 rpm drives as the only option.

The hard drive in the Xbox One is a 2.5" 9.5mm Samsung Spinpoint M8 drive [2]. Seagate purchased Samsung's HDD business in 2011 [3].

[1] https://techreport.com/news/24439/seagate-to-stop-making-720...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/1r5gc6/xbox_one_us...

[3] https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/news/news-archive/seagate-comp...

Ahhh, remember those days when you would get back from the shop with a cartridge, rip off the shrink rap, drop it in the slot, hit the on button and you were playing straight away in seconds. Good times.

Fallout 76 was something like a 45gb install and then a 50gb day 1 "patch"...

That sounds like a lot more effort and time than just downloading 95gb.

Depends where you live. For me, 95gb takes a couple hours. For my friend in Kentucky, it takes at least a week

It's probably not additive. If you bought and installed the game fresh only after the release of the patch, I'd guess the total download size would be well under 95GB. Game patches aren't known for being well optimised binary diffs with minimal download size.

Instead now you have most online services allowing you to pre-download the game (and often the day 1 patches too if any) and just do a quick install on release day. The experience isn't significantly worse, it's just different. Even Nintendo's e-shop supports this, and god knows how far behind they are in terms of online feature support compared to everyone else.

I'm pretty happy to not have to keep a large amount of game boxes and worry about scratching discs too.

EDIT: To your specific example, FO76 released on Nov 14, PS4 preload with base game + day1 patch started on Nov 11 according to online sources I've found.

Yeah, I remember. I also have no wish to go back to those days. If I want to, emulators are easily available, but I don't. Games have moved forward in a lot of ways. Patches are a worthwhile trade-off for what I see as more interesting games.

I don't recall which Yakuza on PS4 requires a patch otherwise it won't go further than the intro.

I'm not completely sure but I also think that Just Cause 3 required a patch at day one to work on PS4 and IIRC it was considerably big against a weak 4 Mbit DSL...

Modern Warfare is approaching 200GB installed these days.

Just a couple of days ago they had a 40GB update, which ballooned to 85GB for a good chunk of people due to an issue with the updater.

I'm confused by the size. Do I really need all assets, if I'm not going to use them. The code size is probably 50mb

A friend really wanted me to play Destiny 2 with him. I was going to give it a shot during one of their free weekends, but didn't do it because my gaming laptop's hard drive is only 500GB, and I didn't want to delete half a dozen games or so just to install Destiny. I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually losing potential players because of it - if the download had been half the size, they certainly could have converted me.

It took me five years and about 2000 hours to get the Destiny monkey off my back. Rarely have I been such an abusive relationship a piece of software. I’ll cut the rant short here, but it’s like their Skinner box was made for me. The questionable (to put it charitably) decisions made by the people running that game still boggle my mind.

They have mentioned a few times (though nothing with specific numbers) that games have a lot of data redundancy to work around poor HDD seek times.

Given the drive speed it might be nice if games could auto-archive into a USB-attached device. The XBox requires custom SSD hardware for expansion (those weird non-USB drives?) and the PS5 will require swapping out the SSD entirely to expand usable space.

... but sequentially copying a compressed archive to a fast USB3.1 device might not be so bad for games not currently in use.

Playstation 5 doesn't swap out the SSD, it's an additional slot for a PCI-E nvme SSD. The onboard SSD that comes with it doesn't seem to be removable.

Ah yes, I misremembered: there's an additional slot but a very specific spec requirement. They'll be whitelisting individual devices.

I don't think it's been confirmed whether they'll be enforcing a whitelist, or merely publishing a list of drives that have been verified to be compatible. The latter seems more likely to me, simply due to the sheer volume of SSD models that will meet the technical requirements. (Especially where we'll see a dozen or more brands selling the same hardware with a different label.)

> I do think we will still see a lot of people connecting USB3.0/USB3.1 external spinning drives to their new-generation consoles.

The real question is: How many games will support that configuration?

A game written for a slower HDD can always be run on an SSD, either with no improvement or an improved experience. But a game specifically designed for an SSD may be unplayable or even unstable on a system with an HDD.

We aren't used to this yet, because they're so rare, as games are designed for the lowest common denominator (i.e. HDDs). But sooner or later an SSD will just be a minimum requirement, and if you lack it that open world game might lock up if you move too fast.

Heck some games might just do a speed test and refuse to even run.

Hopefully single player only games should support that. It's a standard supported configuration on xbox one right now to connect any USB3.0 >250GB HDD externally and move games onto that.

With PS5 there should be a number of single player games where greatly-increased loading times won't have a negative impact on anyone else, unlike multiplayer games where everyone should load into a map at the same time. I have in mind the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, and the upcoming Assassin's Creed.

The push for these crazy fast SSD’s when even a SATA3 SSD would be a huge leap for load times isn’t just to reduce load times but to allow on-demand streaming of assets just in time. An external HDD isn’t going to cut it for the random reads developers looking to get the most out of the hardware are going to be doing.

Archiving games you aren’t currently playing because a USB hard drive is most certainly the faster option for anyone without a gigabit internet connection? Sure. But there’s no chance in hell they will let you run games off one.

I wouldn't be surprised if they shuffle games between external drives and the SSD _almost_ on demand. The HDD might not give the random access and burst speeds new games need, but if they can maintain 100MBps they can transfer a 100GB game in about 15 minutes (and faster if the game can prioritise the assets it needs or boot before it's fully installed). That's not the end of the world - I've had longer patches on PS4.

I don't think the new consoles will even install games onto external drives.

> I do think we will still see a lot of people connecting USB3.0/USB3.1 external spinning drives to their new-generation consoles

I doubt this very much. For one, we already know the storage expansion options for the Xbox series x… which is an external drive equally fast to the internal one.

Ps5 is similar deal except there aren’t any NVMe drives that are compare right now. Maybe there are and I’m unaware, but regardless you can still attach a fast NVMe drive. Ps5 will be approving these drives, to ensure they are fast enough for the system.

Basically no, nobody will be using any external spinning drives for their games. They will be NVMe drives.

Yeah I don’t think I’ll ever forget the first time I bought a game on the Nintendo switch online store, thinking how convenient this will be, only to realize I had to now go but a physical SD card because I didn’t have space.

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