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Anyone have an SSD in a PS3?

S

Syborg1211

Diamond Member
I have seen one instance on the internet of people getting GT5 load times cut in half by replacing their hard drive with an SSD. Has anyone on AT put an SSD in their PS3?

Any tips for people looking to do this?

Any SSD's that might be better suited than others for this task?

Did anyone take down any load time numbers from before and after for any games?

Thanks!
 
If you have money to burn, go for it.

Does not seem worth the cost to me for a marginal load/save time improvement.
 
I'd hardly say an SSD replacing a mechanical HDD is a marginal improvement.... I have two in my gaming PC and it is the most noticeable upgrade I've ever seen. I thought about putting an SSD into my PS3, but I didn't feel the need to because I never played it. I ended up selling it instead.
 
smackababy said:
I'd hardly say an SSD replacing a mechanical HDD is a marginal improvement....
Click to expand...

Take a look at some of the testing that has been done. Most games see marginal improvement (<10%) in time savings. Times for GT5 may seem to be better than that.
 
smackababy said:
I'd hardly say an SSD replacing a mechanical HDD is a marginal improvement.... I have two in my gaming PC and it is the most noticeable upgrade I've ever seen. I thought about putting an SSD into my PS3, but I didn't feel the need to because I never played it. I ended up selling it instead.
Click to expand...

The problem is, the PS3 isn't really that comparable to the PC in this respect. The early tests showed most games didn't benefit all that much from an SSD. Honestly, the biggest bottleneck on the PS3 seems to be Sony's OS and how it handles various things. Remember, the "install" on PS3 isn't the same as if you ripped the entire game to the drive.

I would like to see how that Seagate hybrid drive fares, as I think for many of the PS3 things it would help speed things up, while offering plenty of space for a not terrible price.

They'd definitely do themselves some favors if they put a good 20GB of flash memory right on the motherboard on the next consoles and then set the system up so that its integral to developers (so that its not dependent on there being the option to install, which on the PS3 half the time doesn't seem to make that much difference).
 
I have one of the hybrid drives (500 gb momentus xt) in my ps3.

It's certainly faster than the stock drive, but it's still really not the major bottleneck. A game level load should be purely I/O access, but doubling the transfer speed or cutting the access time to near zero doesn't make as much of a difference as it should so something else is in play.

My theory is that since they're generally loading off a slow optical drive, they're transferring the data compressed and using the CPU to expand into memory. Increasing I/O removes one bottleneck, but the CPU decoding then becomes the new bottleneck, and there's really not that much to be gained.

Still, with a decent ssd or hybrid performance will always be better than a HDD, especially the stock 5400rpm, but don't expect a huge difference.
 
Blu-ray is the biggest bottleneck. Blu-ray is notoriously slow for transferring data quickly which is why most games will have data written more than once onto the Blu-ray disk to help.
 
Hi Everyone - Thanks for the responses. Putting an SSD into my PS3 has been something I've looked into a few times and didn't end up doing because as many of you have stated the gains are not that great for the buck. The problem I have is that most of the people saying the gains are not that big are just passing on word of mouth rooted from a handful of reviews on the web that aren't the most thorough tests in the world.

The above is why I asked on AT to see if anyone had any first-hand experience with numbers to back it up. I guess not many people are meticulous enough to do some thorough testing across multiple games (downloadable as well as disc-based) for before and after comparisons of installation times, level load times, etc. Sounds like it might be time for me to take my engineering hat home and do some testing!
 
Syborg1211 said:
Hi Everyone - Thanks for the responses. Putting an SSD into my PS3 has been something I've looked into a few times and didn't end up doing because as many of you have stated the gains are not that great for the buck. The problem I have is that most of the people saying the gains are not that big are just passing on word of mouth rooted from a handful of reviews on the web that aren't the most thorough tests in the world.

The above is why I asked on AT to see if anyone had any first-hand experience with numbers to back it up. I guess not many people are meticulous enough to do some thorough testing across multiple games (downloadable as well as disc-based) for before and after comparisons of installation times, level load times, etc. Sounds like it might be time for me to take my engineering hat home and do some testing!
Click to expand...

It just doesn't seem worth it at all but awesome if you do it and post up results.

http://community.us.playstation.com/message/686438

http://www.ign.com/videos/2009/05/19/ps3-ssd-vs-hdd

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6192258/index.html

http://www.ps3news.com/PlayStation-3/ps3-hard-drive-game-install-loading-hdd-vs-ssd-speed-test-1/
 
Its a bit like trying to put an engine out of a Shelby GT into a Fiesta. The OS really isn't designed to take advantage of performance the potential performance gains. The optical drive is always going to be the bottleneck anyway. Now if the PS3 allowed you to install full games to the HDD, it might help.
 
mmntech said:
Its a bit like trying to put an engine out of a Shelby GT into a Fiesta. The OS really isn't designed to take advantage of performance the potential performance gains. The optical drive is always going to be the bottleneck anyway. Now if the PS3 allowed you to install full games to the HDD, it might help.
Click to expand...

You can by jail breaking it, and the gains still aren't impressive enough. Although I suspect a true ssd will do much better than a hybrid for one specific reason - jail broken games don't know they're installed.

The typical ps3 scenario is to install some data to hdd, and then during an intensive load to read from both the hdd and the bd at the same time...at least I assume this is what's being done, cause the reasons to do so are so obvious.

When fully installed jail broken game is loaded for the first time, it'll still want to install onto the HDD, so there is some duplication. During an intense load the HDD has to shuffle between the "bd" section of the HDD and the "installed" section of the HDD, and that constant seeking probably slows things down as much as having a fast HDD speeds things up. An SSD wouldn't suffer from this, as the seeks would be instant.

You won't see that test from any gaming site though...they're not going to publicly acknowledge the advantages of hacking your console.
 
Well let's put it this way, would you pay double for a PS3 with an SSD in it if you were buying the PS3 new now? That is essentially what you're doing considering an SSD costs almost as much as the PS3 itself.
 
disappoint said:
Well let's put it this way, would you pay double for a PS3 with an SSD in it if you were buying the PS3 new now? That is essentially what you're doing considering an SSD costs almost as much as the PS3 itself.
Click to expand...

Only super fast and large ones are that expensive. You can get small and slower ones for less than $150 but I don't know how many people want to put a 40GB SSD in their PS3 cus it'd fill up fast.
 
What is the point of this? Stupid waste of money. Just build a gaming desktop with that SSD. Most games are multiplatform, hook up your desktop to your TV and get an xbox controller.
 
If the PS3 had more games that you could copy the majority of content to the HD, then yes it would be useful. Unfortunately unless you mod your PS3, there's not that much point in an SSD versus just buying a huge HD (for example a big WD scorpio black).
 
zerocool84 said:
It just doesn't seem worth it at all but awesome if you do it and post up results.

http://community.us.playstation.com/message/686438

http://www.ign.com/videos/2009/05/19/ps3-ssd-vs-hdd

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6192258/index.html

http://www.ps3news.com/PlayStation-3/ps3-hard-drive-game-install-loading-hdd-vs-ssd-speed-test-1/
Click to expand...

Thanks for the links! I had never seen the forum post from the playstation community, and they are getting closer to what I was looking for in terms of total evaluation of the SSD vs HD.

All these reviews tend to only test installation times and time to launch from the XMB to main menu, but these are things you can start and walk away until they finish. I am more concerned with the things you have to sit there during- loading between levels, how long it takes to load new race tracks in GT5, or even how long it takes to save the game.

I think those things have a much greater impact on your experience than the installation times. I have on many occasions accidentally started up a track on GT5 which I didn't mean to, and it feels like an eternity that I'm sitting there waiting for the track to load just so I can hit exit and wait for the menu to come back up again.

And to those commenting about how much of a waste of money this is - my original post never asked about the economic value of doing such a thing. I am purely interested in the performance advantage, regardless of price. Each person has a different money to performance threshold, but without all the proper performance information, it's difficult to even decide for yourself. I also play a ton of downloaded games off of PSN so the price to performance ratio will be higher for me than the average user.
 
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