There’s an embarrassment of riches in the 136th edition of DF Direct Weekly, spread across almost two hours of ‘content’. We discuss the good and the bad points of the Modern Warfare 3 campaign and EA’s WRC, we spend time talking about how impressive the Switch port of Super Mario RPG is and share impressions on Apple’s newly announced M3 processor line-up. However, for this Eurogamer blog, I’m going to talk about what it’s like to run Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on the slowest, quantifiably worst PCIe Gen 4 SSD ‘upgrade’ money can buy.
Long-time readers/viewers of Digital Foundry may recall that back in the day, when the PS5’s M.2 bay was enabled, we stacked up the internal storage solution with the best and worst PCI Gen 4 SSDs of the time. The Western Digital SN750 SE 250GB is a bit of a stinker to be honest. At just 3200MB/s of bandwidth, it falls well short of the 5500MB/s demanded by Sony, not to mention the 7000MB/s recommended by Mark Cerny when the PS5 was first revealed. It also lacks any kind of DRAM cache, which isn’t helpful. Even so, while slower at transfers, the drive still performed well. It could even run Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart just fine. Clearly, we needed to up the ante.
This is where backers of the DF Supporter Program stepped in, pointing out that the rubbish SN750 SE could be limited still further, by physically taping up a selection of the pins on the PCIe interface, reducing PCIe x4 to x1 bandwidth. Remarkably, the drive still works in the PlayStation 5. According to the PS5’s internal benchmark tool, this gives the console just 1782MB/s of bandwidth to work with, suggesting that the drive ‘might not be fast enough’ to play PS5 games seamlessly.
