Bloomberg called unnamed ‘people informed about the matter’ in the report that PS5 owners will finally be able to expand the system’s built-in storage by next summer. The planned firmware update that will unlock this feature will also allow higher fan speeds on the system to prevent overheating, Bloomberg reports.
For games designed for the PS5, owners are currently limited to 667 GB of usable space on the 825 GB high-speed NVMe disk. This is a very strict limit when individual PS5 games can be 50 to 100 GB or more on the high side. PS5 owners can plug in a standard USB hard drive to store backwards compatible PlayStation 4 games on the system.
Nearly a year ago, Sony announced that the PS5’s storage space could be expanded with certain standard M.2 solid state drives, which were shaped a bit like a gum stick. Sony has said it will measure a number of these drives as compatible with the PS5’s designated 5.5 GBps transfer specifications. But Sony’s Mark Cerny said at the time that the announcement of these officially confirmed PS5-compatible chips would probably be a bit beyond the launch of the PS5. For its Xbox Series X / S line, Microsoft has gone in a different direction by using its own expansion card format to allow for extra fast storage. The only option currently available for the expansion card, a 1TB offering offered by Seagate, is at $ 220.
What kind of ride will I need?
M.2 drives that support the PCIe 4.0 standard, which should meet Sony’s minimum data bandwidth specifications, which currently sell for up to $ 150 for 1 TB. That open market price is likely to continue to decline as competition and technology increase over the years. But Microsoft’s storage expansion solution is now available, while PS5 owners are currently stuck waiting for them to be activated via firmware update.
While Sony says it will be drives it can declare PS5 compatible, other standard PCIe 4.0 drives are likely to work with the PS5 after the upcoming firmware update. It seems unlikely that Sony will make cheaper, slower PCIe 3.0 drives work with the PS5.
“No PCIe 3.0 drive can meet the required specifications,” Cerny said when discussing the expansion of storage options last March.
PS5 compatible M.2 drives are also limited by the size of the expansion space of the PS5 (accessible under the removable faceplate of the system). Many such drives that come with their own cooling plates or fans do not physically fit into the PlayStation 5. The system’s own cooling solutions are the key to ensuring that the cooling plate-free drives can function without fail.
The whole thing promises to be a little more complicated than the plug-and-play simplicity of external USB drives or even internal hard drive replacements on some recent consoles. But it’s the price you pay to ensure developers have access to a data-loading standard that can stream data to RAM at next-generation speeds.