The PS5 drive did not change loading times. It changed the price of dying

Mark Cerny's talk, The Road to PS5, appeared on 18 March 2020 and was built unusually: nearly an hour of engineering detail instead of trailers. The headline figure was an 825 gigabyte drive running at 5.5 gigabytes per second, plus a dedicated hardware block decompressing the Kraken format and raising the effective rate to eight or nine. Sony framed it plainly: what the PlayStation 4 reads in 55 seconds, the PlayStation 5 reads in one.

What the bottleneck actually was

It was not only the 5400 rpm hard drive and its hundred megabytes per second. Two less discussed things got in the way.

The first was decompression. Data on disc is stored compressed, and the central processor unpacked it, taking cores away from the game itself. The second was seek time. To keep the head from hunting, developers duplicated data: the same chunk of geometry was written to the platter several times over, in different orders, for different player routes. That is not sloppiness but engineering practice, and it is why games weighed half again to twice what they needed to.

The PlayStation 5 removed both. A separate block took over decompression, and a solid state drive has no head to move, so there is nothing to duplicate.

Death as a line item

Here is where it gets interesting. In the hard drive era, dying cost the player not only progress but time: a reload in Dark Souls on PlayStation 3 ran to about half a minute, and Bloodborne at launch could take fifty seconds. That was not a technical footnote but part of the difficulty. A designer who knows the player will wait forty seconds places checkpoints differently and tunes a boss differently, because the punishment has already been issued by the hardware.

The Demon's Souls remake, released on PlayStation 5 in November 2020, reloads in seconds. Returnal in 2021 rebuilds a procedural run almost instantly. The punishment supplied by hardware vanished and had to be designed by hand instead: lost runes, a lost run, a reset to the top of the loop. What the platter used to deliver is now written as a rule of the game.

Drive speed is not a convenience. It is the removal of one of the designer's instruments of pressure.

The second consequence: the shape of a level

Corridors, lifts, squeezing through a gap, slow doors and long ladders are not only staging. They are streaming windows: the time in which the engine brings the next piece of the world into memory. Insomniac's Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart in 2021 showed what a level looks like without those windows: a jump between entirely different worlds with no corridor in between.

An honest caveat

Loading has not disappeared; it has moved. A PlayStation 5 game today often takes five to ten seconds to start rather than one, and the drive is no longer to blame: the time goes on engine initialisation, anti-cheat and licence checks, and on personal computers also on shader compilation. The bottleneck shifted from the disc to the processor and to how a launch is organised.

A separate question is what now counts as a save. Quick resume, first shown at scale on Xbox Series in 2020, preserves not the state of the world but a snapshot of memory. The difference matters: a save has always been a description of the world that the game can read back, while a snapshot is a photograph of a process, tied to a specific build and a specific firmware. The first survives a patch. The second does not.

What is worth keeping from the whole drive story is not the megabyte record but a duller thought: hardware speed decides what a designer is allowed to treat as free. Every checkpoint, every corridor and every are you sure you want to quit was once calibrated for a spinning platter.