Bloomberg cites unidentified “informed people” when reporting that PS5 owners will finally be able to expand the system’s built-in storage next summer. The planned firmware update that will unlock this feature will also allow for higher system cooling fan speeds to prevent overheating, reports Bloomberg.
For games designed for the PS5, owners are currently limited to 667 GB of usable space on the system’s 825 GB high-speed NVMe drive. This is a very strict limit when individual PS5 games can be 50 to 100 GB or more at the maximum. PS5 owners can connect a standard USB hard drive to store backwards compatible PlayStation 4 games running on the system.
Almost a year ago, Sony announced that the PS5’s storage space would be expandable with certain standard M.2 solid-state drives, which are shaped like a bubble gum. Sony said it would compare several of these units to ensure compatibility with the PS5’s 5.5 GBps data transfer specifications. But Sony’s Mark Cerny said at the time that the announcement of these officially confirmed PS5-compatible units “would probably go a little further” than the PS5’s launch. For its Xbox Series X / S line, Microsoft went in a different direction, using a proprietary expansion card format to allow for additional high-speed storage. The only option currently available for this expansion card, a 1TB offer from Seagate, sells for a whopping $ 220.
What kind of unit will I need?
M.2 units that support the PCIe 4.0 standard, which must meet Sony’s stated minimum specifications for data bandwidth, currently sold at prices as low as $ 150 for 1 TB. That open market price is likely to continue to fall as competition and technology advance over the years. But Microsoft’s storage expansion solution is now available, while PS5 owners are stuck waiting for yours to be activated through the firmware update.
While Sony says it will benchmark drives it can certify as compatible with the PS5, other standard PCIe 4.0 drives will likely work with the PS5 after the next firmware update. It seems unlikely that Sony will allow cheaper and slower PCIe 3.0 drives to work with the PS5.
“No PCIe 3.0 drive can meet the required specifications,” said Cerny when discussing storage expansion options last March.
PS5-compatible M.2 units will also be limited by the size of the PS5 expansion bay (accessible under the system’s removable front plate). Many of these units that come with their own heatsinks or fans do not physically fit the PlayStation 5. Cooling solutions from the system itself will be critical to ensuring that units without a heatsink can operate flawlessly.
The whole thing promises to be a little more complicated than the plug-and-play simplicity of external USB drives or even replacements for internal hard drives on some recent consoles. But that’s the price you pay to ensure that developers have access to a data loading pattern that can transmit data to RAM at next generation speeds.