Gadgetory

PC building enthusiasts now have had solid-state drives for quite a while we know what it's like to go to an SSD from a harddrive it's nearly a requirement in a modern build a side from the cheapest of the cheap our brethren over in the console camp sadly don't know what it's like they have to go buy a separate solid-state drive throw it into an enclosure or open the thing up and install it and it's just it's it makes me so sad that I nearly want to open a charity to distribute SSDs for them but what we're gonna do instead is test the boot times and other game launch and load times between an SSD externally and an internal hard drive because that alone is massive we're not even talking about opening the thing this is something so simple that anyone pretty much could do it before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly makers of the conductor hot liquid metal that we recently used to drop 20 degrees off of our temperatures thermal grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds we use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydronaut pastes learn more at the link below so we looked into the option of doing an internal replacement it wouldn't be hard we've obviously opened the thing before I mean there's a thermocouple sticking out of it doesn't come like that so it's not too difficult to open it we have a whole video on opening the Xbox one X and the theta is that you do have to do some work with cloning the drive because Microsoft does not officially support an internal drive replacement in fact they still have some types of copy protection on it that make it a little bit annoying to properly clone the drives Sony has done a great job of it from what we understand Sony's is basically a flap in the bottom of the console that anyone can open up and replace the drive and it basically goes so if you've got a Playstation you're in good shape already but we decided to simplify it and just do an external drive we picked up a crucial MX 500's SD for this they're relatively cheap this is a 500 gigabyte drive through a bunch of games on it and let it go so the one terabyte drive that's in here is a Seagate model drive it's an ST 1000 lm0 3/5 which is absolutely positively a 5400 rpm drive some reason people argued with that when we first open the thing even though the data sheets say 5400 rpm so no it is not 7200 and even with the datasheet suggesting a 140 megabyte per second peak transfer rate we're talking a hard drive here it's a physical spinning disk it has to seek to find the data and Burstyn speeds are not the same as sustained speeds and even more important hard drives are particularly bad at random operations 4k IOPS things like that so that's where nasa's d excels and either way the hard drive internally is not bottlenecking on the SATA 3 interface that the Xbox uses and this is where I want to talk to the console users who may not know who we are for a moment everyone else in the PC audience I'm sure you know the difference between the rated speed of an interface and the speed of a device for a console if you've got a SATA 3 interface in there that does 6 gigabits per second but your hard drive does a lot less than that it doesn't really matter in fact we can use this USB 3.0 4.8 gigabit per second cable which is obviously lower than 6 and still get faster speeds and that's just because we're limited by the speed of the device in the case of the hard drive not the speed of the interface so I know that's super basic stuff for a lot of you but we might be talking to a slightly different audience here so I wanted to put that out there let's get into the benchmarks for this we tested five games which is a mix of titles that we've already benchmarked with our in-house benchmark utility framerate measurement utility for Xbox and we also included one game that we might test in the future launch times were measured from the time that the game was selected to the first on-screen prompt that would be like press a to start for example and we have more details in the test methodology section and the article links in the description below if you want to know precisely when we started and stopped our measurement procedure some variants can be expected depending on how long server connections take for multiplayer games and tests to test variants for monster hunter and pub G was a bit higher in this the others on the other hand destiny two's launch times were extremely reliable and the SSD shaved off nearly nineteen two seconds or a 33.7% reduction four of the games we test it had save files that could be loaded and all of them benefited from an SSD for the destiny to campaign test we used a character that had partly completed the first mission of the campaign so that they would load directly into gameplay for the farm test we timed launching into the farm hub level from orbit Final Fantasy 15 has the most gain from an SSD with a load time reduction of sixty six point five percent that saves at forty four seconds not counting the time saved from launching the game Final Fantasy 15 load times are notoriously bad and this doesn't bode well for PC players that don't have 100 plus gigabytes to spare on their SSDs when that comes out later anyway pub G doesn't have a save file to load but it does have something we've complained about in the past obnoxiously slow texture pop-in the easiest place to measure this is in the main menu but our avatar is at three second transformation from the hot dog man to fully textured human wasn't improved enough to be reliably measured it was reliably bad though the time from the end of the previous test periods of the final texture path called menu load in the chart was reduced by a few seconds but most of the time saving happens before the character appears on screen we considered testing texture load times in game but it's hard to create a reproducible test although this was a large part of why we wanted to try and SSD in the first place the bottom line is that an SSD won't solve the popin problems with pub G and it's still noticeably bad there are three Monster Hunter x logs in the chart as well due to the nature of the game the first is just regular load time or how long it took us to load from the main menu to the hub level Capcom's that servers were helpfully busted during testing so we were able to play offline only the multiplayer was just not functional the next period is the preparation phase of a quest and this would normally be when matchmaking happens and party members join but it took a good 30 seconds when choosing a single-player quest an offline mode so some kind of loading is still happening here this a lot of variants run to run the final period is between departing on the quest and actually appearing in the new level of the three the initial load time was the most reliable and with an SSD it was reduced by thirty three point eight percent over hard drive load time using an external SSD with the Xbox one X then is pretty useful and actually worthwhile because we're seeing massive reductions in some of these games GTA 5 would probably be about equivalent to Final Fantasy 15 with Final Fantasy 15 we're talking like 40 seconds for the load screen that was tested every time you load something or fast travel or whatever every loading screen if you're saving 34 percent of your time to 65 percent of your time in the case of Final Fantasy that's a lot of time forty seconds for every the hood screen adds up it's not about like getting minutes of your life back that's kind of overdoing it a bit it's more about just how frustrating it is to sit there staring at a loading screen for 70 seconds that's abnormally long in this day and age so we would say it's worth doing an external drive obviously the ideal thing to do would be replace it with an internal 1 terabyte SSD or something like that it's not too difficult opening the console is easy replacing it at a hardware level is easy we have videos that show how you would open it up the more kinda difficult part is cloning of the drive and getting around copy protection I fix it has a good guide and a script you can run that will do most of that for you if you want to go that route I fix it does have a solution and the one thing here that we wanted to point out is that Microsoft has made it pretty hard to replace the drive and it'll look interesting oh pretty bad think on them if they release a SKU with an SSD in the future it seems like they kind of left the door open for that but with flash prices the way they are that might not have it it might make more sense to just wait for the next generation console so either way pretty pretty straightforward content SSDs are good welcome to the future console players hopefully the the next generation actually has SSDs because I know it seriously it's it's a major difference even if they just did some kind of cache drive solution like an optical and that would be a big deal for the future and it would be cheaper than an SSD so we'll see these were in development for a long time before the new cash Drive started coming out so anyway that's the that's the content for this one subscribe for more you can check our xbox benchmarks on the channel if you're interested or all the PC stuff obviously go to patreon.com/scishow Nexus tops out directly or store it out gamers Nexus dotnet to pick up a shirt like this one or one of our sweet stickers that we stuck on the Xbox and it hasn't even melted off yet so it's actually it's pretty good a test case thanks for watching I'll see you all next time actions take four multiplayer games and test the test variants for Monterey Monterey Monterey Hunter