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Comment by webkike | Hacker News Reader

Wait wait wait, HDD support through USB? Are you serious? Any hardware manufacturers care to explain why this might be the case?

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The HDD is the only user-serviceable part in the PS4, perhaps USB was chosen over PCIe SATA to make theoretical DMA attacks on the system more difficult?

SATA doesn't give you direct access to the DMA engine, the host decides where the data from the drive goes. If anything USB is probably more exploitable.

Well, the SATA controller has DMA access with the host. Of course, you have to find some way to trick the controller into misbehaving, but it's possible.

That would be funny, considering that the original PS3 Jailbreak exploited bugs in Sony's USB code.

Maybe because they support attached storage through USB and could reduce complexity by only sourcing, manufactoring, supporting and making solid one bus/controller? What would they possibly gain by supporting ATA devices?

The video suggests the Blu-Ray drive is attached to an AHCI SATA controller. So maybe there was some other legal or technical reason they needed to isolate it from the internal storage.

If you can get acceptable speeds, why not?

More overhead, CPU, data encapsulation, etc...

USB storage is pretty straightforward today

Besides, for a "single application use", speed is not the biggest consideration. USB2 is several times faster than spinning rust

It is, however, much slower than SATA II, which makes it a very poor choice when considering the volume of data games load off the disk when loading (this probably explains Bloodborne's lackluster loading times).

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