PS5 Won't Support SSD Storage Expansion at Launch, Sony Confirms - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 05 November 2020 / 2,319 Views
The PS5 does have an internal slot that should be able to fit a standard stick-shaped M.2 SSD, however, it can't be used at launch.
Sony speaking with The Verge said the PlayStation 5 at launch won't support SSD storage expansion, but it will be coming down the road. "[T]his is reserved for a future update," said Sony on the internal slot.
The PlayStation 5 comes with an 825 GB SSD, while about 664 GB of that will be usable. Astro’s Playroom, the game that comes pre-installed on the console, takes up 2.38 GB of storage, while the OS and system files take up around 158 GB of storage.
The PlayStation 5 will launch on November 12 in the US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, and in the rest of the world on November 19.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Cerny already stated months ago that they wouldn't be available at launch, but the coming months afterward.
Why would this not be available day 1? This doesn't make any sense.
Oof. Not good Sony :/ hopefully an update releases within a month that fixes that.
Hmm, has Sony even formally stated what the required specs are? They need that spec fully tested, and if they don't know the final spec yet themselves, the console can't exactly confirm spec compliance when you plug in a SSD.
Probably the issue is, being good enough to run current games is one thing, but they need enough head room to allow for when future games fully optimize for Sony's SSD including the I/O architecture... The latter being what off the shelf SSDs won't be built for, although it seems plausible we could eventually see compatible I/O set-ups for 3rd party SSD, not just for PS5 compatibility but because that seems to allow alot better real-world benefit, conventional I/O systems otherwise imposing their own bottlenecks that prevent X faster speed from translating into X faster real world benefit.
I suppose you can say "if Sony doesn't know if X or Y will be the standard, but Z will work" then they could enable Z compliant SSD right now, but that honestly doesn't feel like "the console way", if they are testing specs and will soon 100% commit and publicize what it will be, probably simplest just to wait and do it all in one go. And anyways, it's not like there is enough PS5 native games right now that need to be installed on PS5 drive. I do seem to remember some SSD being advertised as PS5 compatible, interesting to see if it is or isn't in the end.
Mark Cerny said something around 7-7.5 Gbps read/write would be necessary and that they were working on checking which drives would be compatible but didn't expect any to be available in the market by the time PS5 launched.
Wasn't planning on buying an expansion until my drive is full and storage prices come down anyway. How soon will depend on how big the average next gen game ends up being.
when the number of big hitter games arrive you will need the expansion space
I can always uninstall finished games and reinstall whenever I wanna replay like I already do with my massive Steam library. Whether I expand at all will depend on how big the average game ends up being and how many I wanna keep on hand at once.
Yeah. Deleting is always an option. Every system has to deal with the storage space. It almost seems like sony and microsoft counted on ssd prices lowering and capacities increasing more quickly. I'm sure by next year they will have larger capacity models to replace the launch ones.
External HD. I’m good.
That's weird.
Phew - quite relieved at that. With a console, extra controller, dock, headphones already ordered i didn't fancy spending any more money. Will guy one sometime in 2020 when they become available to use.
Big oof. That's an insane amount of storage the OS and system files take! Not even Windows 10 requires anywhere near that amount of storage. With Demon's Souls taking around 66GB, Spider-Man: Miles Morales taking upwards of 105GB, and the new CoD taking 136GB, that's already half of what's available for storage for just 3 games! That ssd expansion slot better be available for use rather quickly.
Expect a year of wait till you can buy a good ssd expansion that works with the focus of Sony on its ssd.For me personally not really a problem since i do not play many games at once and the current ssd still gives you room to on average switch between 10 to 20 games.
Guys you are making some confunsions. OS doesn't take that much space on PS5 or Series. You have to first consider that the Gb used for storage is base 10 versus the binary of how the system recognizes it. Second there is space reserved for system updates plus games patching download, also to save the screen capture (that is always saving the last 15min or so) plus apps, etc.
There's also the space for quick resume. Which is probably 40 Gigs or so. Total ram × number of games you can suspend.
Astro's Room is quite small them. Sad to see so expansion available yet even if you have the drive.
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