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Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

> 667GB of usable storage doesn't go as far as you might like.

Wow, WHAT?! It has a 825GB NVMe, so that means the OS/system default is ~158gb. That seems super high to me. Considering when you think of the size of MacOS or Windows 10, that seems like a very poor optimization on their end. Especially when you consider most triple A titles these days are getting upwards of 200gb (looking at you, latest Call of Duty games). You think they would have optimized the system and OS files a ton more to get it down to at least 50gb or less.

But that could just be a bad personal take, someone technical please correct me if that ~158gb is justified somehow...

UPDATE: I get that it's not just PURELY OS size probably, but even ~158gb seems incredibly large RESERVED space compared to your average computer for the system to need. It still smells like poor optimization on the developer end to me.

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I'd guess this is more like "space reserved for system purposes" than OS size alone. You need space to upgrade OS components, probably space for the hibernate-like feature of consoles and a bunch of other stuff I don't know about.

They also can't easily increase the amount of storage for the system, but they can decrease it in the future. So they might include a bit of buffer they don't use yet.

It could be that 825GB is the typical marketing GB (i.e., 1000^3) and the 667GB is the OS reported GB (i.e., 1024^3). That difference only reduces the 825 "marketing" GB to 768 "real" GB. So still a 100GB of OS/system files, which seems large, as you say.

giga- (along with kilo-, mega-, peta- and every other prefix we've ever used with bytes) in any other context is based on powers of 10.

Just because computers are based on binary doesn't mean it was ever a good idea to redefine the meaning of those prefixes.

Save states write to the SSD. That's taking up a chunk of storage.

I'm not sure about the PS5, but the Xbox Series has support for four games to be put into the background and brought back in roughly 2 seconds. Four games at 16GB per game is 64 GB of storage.

I hope they add the ability to reduce this to free up more storage. I don't share my systems with other people and only ever play one game at a time.

It may be 10% reserved to prolong SSD lifespan. Especially if they are using QLC memory (or as we should marketing-call it - 4-level MLC). Another idea - fully populated SSD drive is slow, because when it has a lot of free space it can emulate SLC mode by using some space behind the scenes, freeing it when needed. Samsung calls this Turbo Write technology.

It’s not all operating system. Space reserved to avoid ssd performance degradation on full drives, keeping it open for future software updates, cache etc.

The Xbox is doing the same thing, they reserve ~180GB of space for OS and the smart resume feature. They need to be able to store the full memory state of 10 games on the SSD, which works out to 13.5*10=135, so add OS room and you got it. They’ll probably make it configurable if people start hitting the limit immediately.

This is becoming an issue on PC as well.

The new Call of Duty Modern Warfare + Warzone takes up over 256GB of an SSD.

All of a sudden 1TB SSD seems like tiny. I wonder when we could see 2TB SSD at sub $100 RSP.

Some consumer whatcdog should start looking at those claims, thats just borderline false marketing claims.

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