I was looking to lower the power use of my PS3, since I use it a lot for watching youtube news, Netflix, and educational videos in the background as I’m working.
This thing’s been sitting in a box, basically brand new since if I was ever a gamer I was into PC games, and bought it years ago because of the cool factor of the Cell Processor. Prior to replacing platter drive, I noticed that the system was very hard on it due to caching. Because of this, I decided to use one of my backup Enterprise Intel SSD’s to replace it, due to the high durability ratings and large on disk DRAM cache… After updating the SSD firmware and completing the replacement, I noticed a dramatic improvement in picture and sound clarity. Then I remembered a trip I took back in 2007, when I traveled to UW Madison School of Engineering to Market IBM’s leading edge technology from that time period as part of an initiative to get students interested in engineering. The hardware I was presenting from the company was the Cell Processor used in this system from that time period.
In short, adding this type of error correcting/large cache business class drive to the PS3 totally changes its performance abilities relative to streaming video reproduction. This due to the high precision and throughput capabilities of the Cell, and it’s video disk caching feature.
I made a video for anyone that’s interested in checking this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kdRukO50ts
Feel free to comment or ask questions about any specific configuration items I haven’t mentioned. There are a lot of other dependencies which are not mentioned in the video, such as firewall configuration and PS3 video and audio settings. The color and clarity improvements are also much more noticeable on televisions capable of displaying a wider color gamut, such as plasma or OLED tv’s. I have little doubt that this would have a similar effect on a PS4, though I am not too familiar with it’s hardware configuration and whether or not its internal interfaces are compatible with enterprise storage standards. If anyone else knows, feel free to comment.