5.5GB/s, very impressive indeed! That’s getting close to the speeds of Samsung’s 980 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD With PCIe 4.0!
You answered your own question. The PS is doing hardware compression which will effectively increase your bandwidth by your compression ratio. 2:1 isn’t that hard to believe.
Show me 2:1 compression on game assets that are commonly already heavily compressed. Need to see the Weismann score on that! ;)
1) the link doesn’t say 2:1 compression now, but rather 1.5:1 with more in the future. Where I obviously made an error in judgment was assuming this was from previously compressed textures, where as this seems it’ll be the way to initially compress the textures. Great results, just hadn’t thought about it that way, silly me.
2) it doesn’t matter anyway, the SSDs actual read speed is 5.5GB/sec (aka 44Gbps) raw performance. About the only mass market consumer targeted drive I know of (could be others of course) that’s faster is the one I mentioned in a sibling comment (Sabrent M2 Gen4 tops out at 5GB/sec for example) Further, without having heard officially myself, I believe this confirms its PCIe 4.0 bus internally (which wouldn’t be surprising given other specs I know), as if memory serves PCIe 3.0 can’t get that high.
You sure about that number? That would be close to 2X faster SSD than Apple uses in new MBPs and they are already insanely fast compared to most SSDs. Would love a source if you have it.