That may be so for the camera division but not for PlayStation. My PS3 takes a standard 2.5” drive. Not sure about PS4.

First thing I did after buying a PS4 Pro late-cycle was replace the internal HDD with a (bog-standard, massive, cheap) SSD. Considering how fast my games tend to load, I honestly wonder how the PS5 benchmarks compared to my SSDified PS4 Pro.

A benchmark is going to be an order of magnitude faster, because it's not using SATA.

But more importantly the big goal of building in the SSD is so that games can be designed with no load times, which beats any loading time number you can hit.

Even if you have the max of SATA3's 6Gbps, the on-board SSD of the PS5 with hardware compression should load at 44Gbps.

Correction : the 44 Gbps (5.5 GB/s) is the raw bandwidth, without compression. Compressed data bandwidth is higher, but variable.

You answered your own question. The PS is doing hardware compression which will effectively increase your bandwidth by your compression ratio. 2:1 isn’t that hard to believe.

Show me 2:1 compression on game assets that are commonly already heavily compressed. Need to see the Weismann score on that! ;)

1) the link doesn’t say 2:1 compression now, but rather 1.5:1 with more in the future. Where I obviously made an error in judgment was assuming this was from previously compressed textures, where as this seems it’ll be the way to initially compress the textures. Great results, just hadn’t thought about it that way, silly me.

2) it doesn’t matter anyway, the SSDs actual read speed is 5.5GB/sec (aka 44Gbps) raw performance. About the only mass market consumer targeted drive I know of (could be others of course) that’s faster is the one I mentioned in a sibling comment (Sabrent M2 Gen4 tops out at 5GB/sec for example) Further, without having heard officially myself, I believe this confirms its PCIe 4.0 bus internally (which wouldn’t be surprising given other specs I know), as if memory serves PCIe 3.0 can’t get that high.

The PS3 was well after the ship had sailed. That’s the whole point, it took them 3 generations to stop. The PS1 and 2 both required custom memory cards as well when the original Xbox was using a standard SATA drive.

Oh how the turntables.

You might be misremembering reality - yes, the original xbox shipped with a normal drive, but the X360 had a proprietary drive in a custom enclosure, but actually the most popular model didn't come with any drive at all - just a proprietary memory card. Then the Xbox One has a regular sata drive, but I wouldn't call it "user replaceable" - it's very hard to access and requires a complete disassembly of the console, while on PS3 and PS4 all you needed to do was remove one screw and the drive would come out. The same seems to be true on PS5 again.

What are you talking about? The xbox360 was an off the shelf 2.5” drive with custom firmware in an enclosure that took 30 seconds to open.

https://youtu.be/XIrW4pzVNmk

Ignoring the fact that the 360 isn’t the original Xbox... which is what I literally said.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_(console)

I did address the original Xbox though, did you miss my first two sentences?

I clearly read your first two sentences. You told me I misremembered reality, claimed the 360 was a proprietary drive, and were wrong.