That's also one of the reasons I'm holding off on building a new gaming PC. Part of it is the stupid prices right now. But the other part is that I know PC games will eventually be designed to take advantage of fast storage like the PS5.
The PS5 version of Ghost of Tsushima probably has the quickest fast travel I've ever seen. It's usually 1 to 3 seconds across the open world.
I played Tsushima on the PS5 but using the PS4 app having the game installed on an external SSD. The difference is really quite big even between those two. I was using an external SSD even towards the end of life on the PS4 so it would feel weird now going back to a HDD. On a side note, all of the comparison videos I have seen tend show an M.2 drive in the PS5 having a performance improvement over the stock SSD. Now I know when load times are already 1-2 seconds a few ms isn't much, but it shows how fast a PCI-E gen 4 drive can be and how it can really improve the PC gaming world.
It was a bit jarring to play PS5 games for awhile then jump on PC and find myself staring at a loading screen for a bit. You mostly see the lightning fast loading times with first party games optimized for PS5 like Spider-man, Returnal, Ratchet, Demon's Souls, and this new PS5 version of Ghost. This is going to be a really great development for all platforms in the long run. Advancements in storage have been pretty stagnant and slow. This is a huge leap forward. We had typically been seeing modest increases in speed but the only number people cared about was the total storage capacity. Drive speed and technology utilized are now going to get a lot more attention, and more importantly software and I/O hardware will start to take advantage of what a very fast drive can do.
I haven't been following Windows 11 news very closely but wont it have some kind of DirectStorage requirement which feeds data right to the GPU? I'm not sure if that is at all similar to how the PS5 operates.
What method would be the most effective in transferring from a SATA III Samsung 850 Evo 1TB SSD to my new SK Hynix Gold P31 2TB NVMe M.2? I've typically just reinstalled Windows and re-downloaded things I needed, but I think I'm on a free upgrade to Windows 10 and might have to pay for Windows again if it gets erased. What is the best way to go about formatting, cloning, and transferring that doesn't require anything to be reinstalled? I've downloaded the free version of Macrium Reflect 8 but am open to other options if you have better ideas. I'd rather not screw this up. I have the new NVMe drive installed (after dropping the smallest screw I've ever seen onto the board several times and playing a microscopic version of Operation repeatedly to retrieve it) and it's showing up in the SK Hynix software I downloaded, but it doesn't seem to be formatted properly and didn't show up as a lettered drive yet.
You'll be OK to reinstall win 10, just put the license key in you have for Win7/8 and it will activate fine. Disk management, right click drive and initialise it to give it a drive letter.
I got it cloned and booted up relatively quickly with Macrium, but it creates it with half of my NVMe being unformatted and unusable. I am not sure how to create the clone for a larger storage drive. It just replicates what is on my old SATA III drive and leaves the remaining nearly 1TB unformatted.
I don't have a partially formatted drive available to me at home to test, but I'm sure even windows 10 let's you expand the main drive in disk management. Just right click and chose expand grow, whatever the option is.
That seemed to do it. 1019.61 GB remaining is much better than 80 GB. Thanks. I apparently did the cloning correctly several times but just didn't know how to make the rest of the drive accessible. I thought you had to have all the formatting and allocation done within the same cloning process. I didn't know you could just go in after the fact and expand it that way.
I just noticed that PCI-e Gen 4 prices have been dropping hard. I got a Solidigm P44 Pro 2TB off Newegg for $120. It was $300 3 months ago. Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB was $429 in Aug 2021. Now $140. Budget 1TB sticks are about $50. I'm seeing the same drop with SATA drives. Samsung 870 EVO 2TB went from $300 to $109.
Samsung and Micron overproduced DRAM and NAND. Demand for PCs dropped off after the pandemic ended, probably due to fewer people working from home. So the prices of RAM and SSDs have been in free fall. I don't think it's a good time to build a new PC because GPUs are still stupidly expensive. But if you have an existing PC there's never been a better time to upgrade your storage and memory. The Crucial MX500 2TB is going for $107. I grabbed two of those for mass storage. I also caught an Amazon flash deal on the 2TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus where it was $120. The Thinkpad Laptops my wife and I use are older and only have nvme Gen 3, so the 970 is fine. Edit: just looked and the 2TB 970 is now down to $112. lol.
People building new PCs might be going for Gen 5. They're still expensive, but if the price drops too much no one would need to buy the Gen 4s. I'm still debating if I want get a 2 TB 970 SSD. I have a 1 TB 860 EVO dedicated to Steam games that's 95% full. I suppose I could just delete some games, but mostly it's like 10 games eating up all the drive space. I'm looking at you Red Dead Redemption 2 and Master Chief collection. Some day I will finish you.
That's a crazy price for that. I had no idea what the bottom would be on SSDs so already bought a bunch of them months ago.
Best Buy has refurbished 2TB 970s for $65. Many people are saying they have less than 10 hours on them, but I'd pay a bit more for new.