[Hardware] How fast is the PS5 and Xbox Series X SSD when loading games?

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One of the most important new features on both PS5 and Xbox Series X is the SSD. Which bring with them a series of advantages, including the speed of loading the data from them to the RAM memory, which translates into less loading time for games. But how do both consoles perform that aspect?

The hard drive came to the consoles with the original Xbox, but at that time it was not used to install games but to speed up their loading. So it was not until the appearance of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 when console games began to take advantage of conventional hard drives, which compared to optical formats have a much faster transfer speed, which allowed loading larger scenarios and therefore more complex games.

Facing the next generation, the bet is on the use of solid state memory, which brings a series of advantages over conventional hard drives, including a much higher access speed thanks to its greater bandwidth, which brings with it an increase in the speed of the loading times of the games, among many other advantages.

PS5 and Xbox Series X: loading times compared

The comparisons are made using the internal SSD of each console, let's not forget that at the moment SONY does not allow the use of the PS5 expansion bay.

The first thing that surprises us is that the Microsoft console is faster faster in the tests, especially if we consider that the bandwidth of its internal SSD is 2.4 GB / s compared to the 5.5 GB / s of the unit on PS5, so slower access speeds on PS5 are surprising.

Keep in mind that, although PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games are compared, which do not use compression formats and are not optimized for the use of the SSD, they do benefit from much faster loading times and by logic an SSD with a higher bandwidth should load the data in less time.

However, it does not always have to be this way and there are other factors that influence the performance of a storage disk when transmitting data.

Is the SONY console SSD slower than promised?
PS5 SSD

It must be taken into account that when a game transmits from the disk, whether solid or mechanical, it does the RAM what it does is send data packets intermittently, so the data flow is not always open and running at its maximum capacity.

So it will depend on how the sending from the games is carried out, since we can find that the level of bandwidth use by the different games is much lower than the optimal one simply because of how the packet transmission is carried out of data. Do not forget that the comparison is with games that were programmed in their day to work with a hard disk with a few hundred megabytes per second of transfer.

Taking into account that 99% of the games on the market will come out for both consoles, the normal thing is that the games are optimized for the minimum common in each of the specifications, this means that a good part of the games will optimize their SSD communication ↔ RAM to work on Xbox Series X and will port from there to PS5, where thanks to its higher bandwidth the games will work without problems in that regard, but will not take full advantage of the bandwidth that the PS5 SSD provides.