Xbox One VS PS4: Are The PlayStation 4 And Xbone Hard Drives Poorly Designed?
The Xbox One VS PS4 battle continues to be wage over the internet, but are gamers being ripped off by the poor design of both the PlayStation 4 and Xbone?
In a related report by The Inquisitr, some Microsoft fans are also claiming the Xbox One exclusives make it the winner of the 2014 battle.
In part 1 of this series we discussed how the PS4 and Xbox One both should have been faster based upon a cost comparison to previous generations and also for what is possible on PC video cards. For evidence for this we discussed how voxel-based graphics effects and even path tracing is not possible on the faster PS4 GPU, never mind rendering at 4K Ultra HD resolutions. But as many gamers know graphics does not equate to gameplay so now we’ll discuss the other practical epic fails this next generation has committed.
The first obvious one is the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hard drive. The PS3 hard drive was relatively easy to swap out with a screwdriver while the Xbox 360 hard drive didn’t require tools at all. This time around you have to dig into both the PS4 and Xbone, but Microsoft has made access to the HD more difficult than it should be. Some say this was done on purpose by both companies in order to force gamers to purchase a new console once they start running out of space.
This brings up the second reason why gamers are being gypped by both Sony and Microsoft. At only 500 GB, gamers are already contending with game installs and updates that require a large percentage of the available space. For example, Titanfall was recently confirmed to require 20 GB at minimum. Worse, the Xbox One does not even officially recognize hard drives larger than 500 at the moment, although there is a Linux-based hack to work around this problem. The only good news is that both systems have an eSATA port, although supposedly a Xbox One patch coming in the future will allow external access.
The third reason the Xbox One and PS4 hard drives are so chintzy is because of the HD performance. New games will be loading up uncompressed high resolution textures but Sony and Microsoft both chose a 5400 RPM platter-based HD. While, yes, it’s understandable why they didn’t go with a SSD because of the much higher cost, they could have least given us a 7200 RPM hard drive. Better yet, they could have given us a Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD), which costs only about 20 percent more per gigabyte and PlayStation 4 SSHD tests running Assassin’s Creed 4 show loading times decrease by about one-fourth. (Note that these results vary based upon the game and some benefit even more from a faster HD.)
The PS4 SSD tests also revealed an interesting design flaw. Reports claim that the load times from digital games purchased on the PlayStation Network are actually noticeably better in comparison to the BluRay disc version. For example, “even with the stock hard drive we see load times drop from 35 seconds to 28 seconds, a decrease of nearly 20 percent.” The going theory is that the PS4 disc drive is being authenticated regularly and the effect is a noticeable slowdown. Hopefully, this might an issue that a PS4 patch can resolve.
What do you think about the Xbox and PS4 based upon these design problems? Also, check out part 3 in the series, which discusses the problem with the controllers!
