Hardware Internal storage faster or ssd in usb?

[zergslayer69]

So we know the disc drive reads around 22.5 meg a sec and usb 2.0 tops out around what...40ish meg a sec? How fast is the internal flash? Would it be comparable to a ssd plugged in or slower?

 

[Slartibartfast42]

Internal is going to be way faster. I don't know specifically about the flash in the Wii U, but a good SSD can reach speeds over 500MB/s.

 

[isira]

Internal is going to be way faster. I don't know specifically about the flash in the Wii U, but a good SSD can reach speeds over 500MB/s.

Not according to this benchmark. External SSD > Internal > External HDD > Disc, with about a second difference between the fastest and the slowest in that game.

 

[Slartibartfast42]

Not according to this benchmark. External SSD > Internal > External HDD > Disc, with about a second difference between the fastest and the slowest in that game.

Well that's a very specific test and the results were basically that it doesn't matter. What this really shows is that storage read speed is not the limiting factor in game load times.

 

[trumpet-205]

So we know the disc drive reads around 22.5 meg a sec and usb 2.0 tops out around what...40ish meg a sec? How fast is the internal flash? Would it be comparable to a ssd plugged in or slower?

USB 2.0 has max theoretical speed of 480 Mbit/s, which is equivalent of 60 MB/s. Taking into account of overhead, actual max speed is about 35 MB/s (280 Mbit/s).

Internal and external SSD have about the same performance for Wii U.

Internal is going to be way faster. I don't know specifically about the flash in the Wii U, but a good SSD can reach speeds over 500MB/s.

Except that WIi U doesn't use performance grade NAND found in SSD. Wii U uses mainstream MMC in BGA packaging, and these are low cost NAND rather than performance grade. Because the bottleneck is on USB 2.0, external SSD and internal eMMC will perform about the same.

Both of internal and external SSD solve one problem with external HDD and disc, low random read speed.

 

[Slartibartfast42]

What are we paying for if they cheap out on every component? Why is there only 32GB of space if they put cheap stuff in there? Good SSD now costs $.50/GB. That's retail price now. Clearly wholesale even a couple years ago should have been that low. They couldn't afford to put $15 worth of memory in a $350 console? If they are using cheap MMC, why not put in a lot more? Why not give people 512GB Wii U's for what they paid for one. They put $2 worth of memory in a $350 console? Not fair.

 

[tswntk]

lol, the role of a boss and design engineers are to squeeze every single cents out of the manufacturing cost while maintaining "reasonable" quality.

 

[zergslayer69]

I dunno, when the wii u came out, the max storage option was 32gb when the previous gen had stock hard drives up to 500gb. Kind of unexcusable really. But whatever, at least you can easily attach more storage. If only they had usb 3, that would make external ssd a clear winner.

 

[SG]

I dunno, when the wii u came out, the max storage option was 32gb when the previous gen had stock hard drives up to 500gb. Kind of unexcusable really. But whatever, at least you can easily attach more storage. If only they had usb 3, that would make external ssd a clear winner.

...And not including at least ONE USB3.0 port was incredibly stingy of Nintendo - PS4 & BXO both have that capability; and yes I know that technologically Wii U isn't competing with them but this isn't about graphics or CPU speeds. They could have at least made the hardware upgradable. But then, this is Nintendo - so is anyone really surprised?

 

[zergslayer69]

So, interesting tidbit. I have the 64gb sililcon power usb 3 stick. I plugged it into the wii u and moved mario kart and mario 3d world over and tested some times. It was a really rough test with a stopwatch. Basically I timed it from the moment you hit A to select the game until you reach the game's main screen and the "press A button" shows up. Comparing between the internal drive and the flash drive, the flash stick loaded to that screen 4 seconds faster for both games. In addition, loading the same kart/track in mario kart, the flash stick loaded it 2 seconds faster than the internal. Most people won't care, but for those that wonder, this is your unscientific proof that either my flash drive is super fast, or the internal drive is JUST good enough. It's no SSD of any sort that's for sure.