Can the slowest PS5 NVMe upgrade run Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart? • Eurogamer.net

Sony’s latest system software update for PlayStation 5 went live last week, giving all users the option to use the M.2 storage expansion bay for NVMe drive upgrades. . The limitation of the 667 GB internal drive for PS5 applications is now a thing of the past and games can be run from virtually any PCIe Gen 4.0 drive installed in the console. Sony has a series of recommendations, but what happens when you install a drive that doesn’t meet the required specifications? In fact, what happens when you boost your PS5 with the Absolutely Slowest PCIe Gen 4.0 Drive can money buy? Enter the Western Digital SN750 SE.

“Cheap and cheerful” sums up the SN750 SE perfectly. Prices start at just £ 56 for the 250GB model, which is the slowest model in the range (larger capacity versions are faster). Its low-specification nature poses challenges to meet the requirements of the PS5 in a few dimensions. First, there is the recommendation of 5500MB / s sequential read bandwidth (Mark Cerny actually specified 7000MB / s in the Road to PS5 presentation) and here the SN750 SE only manages one paltry 3200MB / s – only 58% of the required transfer rate.

The second problem concerns the lack of on-board cache on the SN750 SE. This is called a DRAM-free design with Western Digital which uses what is called the host memory buffer instead. Anandtech has a good description of the technology, but essentially HMB uses a PC’s system RAM for caching in order to improve performance. From Sony’s FAQs, the PS5 – quite understandably – does not support HMB, and there are performance degradation warnings if you use any of these drives in the console. The SN750 SE also lacks a heat sink, again recommended by Sony, but I solved this by purchasing a third-party aluminum from Amazon.

So based on the low transfer speeds and lack of cache, the SN750 SE shouldn’t perform well on PlayStation 5, but I don’t want this piece to be seen as a Western Digital review in particular because basically, the drive is well priced for what it offers and should perform very well for its target market in a Windows machine. Not only that, but the company also offers the SN850, which exceeds Sony’s basic requirements and actually meets Cerny’s original specs – to the point where the The system architect of the PS5 announced to the world let him use one. For our testing, Western Digital provided a 1TB sample and we can highly recommend it.

However, I’m going to get right to the point here and say that despite the SN750 SE not meeting the key criteria, I might find very little trouble with it once installed in my PlayStation 5 – on today’s titles. , at least. Of course, the first order of business was to transfer Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart’s heavy storage from Insomniac to the player and play it, where I found the in-game experience to be essentially the same as playing the game. both on the internal SSD and the much faster SN850. The game has split second performance drops when moving between the game’s characteristic dimensional portals, and these stutters seem to vary very slightly in severity from run to run, but the bottom line is that on a a number of portals, the SN750 SE, SN850 or internal reader may be a little faster or a little slower. We’re literally talking about lost frames here, for the most part, and the experience of playing the game on all three discs was found to be interchangeable in the areas we tested.

From there, I moved on to load time tests. Ratchet and Clank boot from the push of the front button to the in-game menu in seven seconds on the internal player, the SN850 a fraction of a second later, while the SN750 SE takes almost ten seconds. This is the biggest load time performance differential I’ve been able to find and shows that even a slower drive is ridiculously fast compared to last-gen storage experiences. From there, I also tested the in-game menu jumping to various saved game states. The internal drive was almost always a bit faster, but the SN850 and SN750 SE were still fractions of a second away from Sony’s internal solution. It was a similar scenario with Ghost of Tsushima, where all discs could restore a saved game state within seconds.

These titles use a combination of raw SSD performance and Sony’s new low-level storage APIs, which leverage hardware decompression blocks that effectively double disk bandwidth. However, I also tested Control Ultimate Edition which I understand still uses its legacy CPU-based data decompression – and again, I didn’t find any significant difference in load times. It’s obviously much slower than games that to do use “next-gen” charging technology, but the SN750 SE has no real drawbacks compared to other readers.

I anticipate that some of these results may be surprising – particularly in the way Ratchet and Clank performed on an SSD which is so far below Sony’s requirements – but based on an admittedly small sample the evidence suggests that you can get away with buying an out-of-spec driver and save yourself some money in the process … at least here and now. My take on the results is that we shouldn’t expect to see SSD pushed to its limits in first-gen PlayStation 5 titles. The SN750 SE may be the slowest PCIe Gen 4.0 drive we’ve been able to find, but it’s still capable of loading at 3200MB / s and that’s still a lot of bandwidth, further boosted by decompression technology. integrated hardware. However, as we move properly to next-gen development exclusively, we should expect to see the demands on games increase and at this point, going for a cheaper player that does not meet Sony’s specifications can prove problematic.

Even here and now I have encountered issues with the SN750 SE that make me think. Drive write speeds aren’t great and the issues here seem to be exacerbated in PlayStation 5. Copying a hundred gigs of Cyberpunk 2077 from the internal drive to the SN750 SE, I found transfer times that ranged from nine minutes 21 seconds up to 13 minutes. Elsewhere, as you’ll see in the tables on this page, the time it takes to move data to the drive is terribly long compared to the spec-compliant SN850. I also found that for a short while the SN750 SE had problems loading Cyberpunk 2077 saves. Removing the drive for product photography and reinstalling it seemed to fix the problem, but during the time I encountered some problems, I haven’t had any issues with any other game. In terms of data transfer to the internal drive, this seems to be artificially limited by Sony. It’s very, very slow but has proven to be consistent between the SN850 and the SN750 SE.

So, ultimately, practical testing with the SN750 SE suggests that a slow drive performs well, but choosing an SSD that doesn’t meet Sony’s specs always leaves an element of doubt – that at some point we will. will come across game scenarios that are limited by the reader. This is where I think Sony can do better. Put simply, the system benchmark performed by the PS5 does not appear to be accurate. With the SN850 (and in fact the Samsung 980 Pro that we tested previously), the bandwidth of 7000MB / s is estimated to be over 6543MB / s. Maybe the PCIe interface is slightly restricted, maybe be not. However, the SN750 SE’s 3200MB / s maximum resolves to a frankly incredible 5174MB / s according to the PS5 benchmark, casting doubt on its accuracy. I think the best way forward would be for Sony to release a storage stress test benchmark or tech demo to really put these drives to the test – or at least for the test to yield accurate results.

Despite the generally favorable results of the SN750 SE, my advice would still be to stick to the specs described by Sony when choosing a storage upgrade for your PS5 – but I still think there is a lot to recommend. for the purchase of a good external SSD that you connect via USB. It won’t run your PlayStation 5 games, but in our testing, PlayStation 4 games load just as quickly – if not faster – than from the internal SSD, while nothing is stopping you from archiving your PS5 games. no more. This is an attractive alternative in a world where high-end NVMe drives are expensive. But we’ll be keeping our SN750 SE – and we’ll be sure to try it out on future versions that rely heavily on the storage capabilities of Sony’s latest console.

Many thanks to ‘Fidler_2K’ from the Digital Foundry Supporter Program for helping to make this project possible.