Thraktor
"[✄]. [✄]. [✄]. [✄]." -Microsoft
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sorry, I forgot to reply to this. On Rockstar, it's important to remember that Rockstar are Take Two, it's just a publishing brand they use for big budget open world games. The creation of the Rockstar publishing brand, and the renaming of DMA Design to Rockstar North was part of a move to exert more control over the studio; they literally forced the studio heads to move to New York so that they'd be in the same building as Take Two's management. They can't tell Take Two no any more than I can tell myself no when there are tasty snacks in front of me (I try, it doesn't work).
On the NVMe drives, they can run hot, but it depends on a few different things. Firstly whether it's reading or writing data. If a drive is only reading data, it consumes a lot less power, as shown in the graphs in the post I linked to. This is because there's not a lot for the flash controller to do when reading data, it's literally just passing data from the NAND to the PCIe link. The flash controller is a lot more busy when writing data, because it has to manage the health of the NAND while doing so. If you just rewrite data over and over to a single NAND cell, it loses its ability to hold charge, and can no longer store any data. So when you write files to an SSD, the flash controller has to keep track of what condition every block of NAND cells is in, and write to the least damaged cells, to maintain the health of the drive (this is called wear levelling). This requires a lot more processing power than just passing data across, so it consumes a lot more power than when reading, and the faster you write data, the more power is consumed.
The reason this isn't an issue on consoles is that you're never really going to be writing data that fast. The MP600 Mini I linked to consumes up to 3.6W while writing, but that's at a rate of around 3.7GB/s. There's no need for a console to write data that fast, as generally you're only writing to the drive when you're downloading a game, or a patch, or saving a game. In the first two scenarios, you're limited by your broadband speed, which even for the fastest connections would be around 0.1GB/s (assuming Nintendo even had servers which could keep up with that, which they don't). Saving games only involves very small amounts of data, and similarly doesn't need much bandwidth. In theory if you're doing an Xbox style quick-resume where you're dumping the entire contents of RAM to storage, you could hit higher write speeds, but it would only be very briefly.
The other factor is what kind of drive it is. Higher-end drives usually have on-board DRAM to improve performance, and these will usually consume more power (around 2-3W for reads for PCIe 4.0 drives these days, it seems). Lower-end drives, like the ones I showed you, don't have DRAM, and consume less power. Both Xbox Series and PS5 use SSDs without DRAM, and the smaller M.2 2230 drives I was looking at (which are as large as you could fit in a Switch style device) are all made without DRAM, so if Nintendo were to use an NVMe drive, it's safe to say it would be one of the cheaper, more efficient drives without DRAM.
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