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Your PC NVMe SSDs can slot straight into the PS5I spy a sneaky M.2 drive.
I spy a sneaky M.2 drive.
Sony published a teardown video of their new PlayStation 5 console the other day, revealing an intriguing detail about its expandable storage options. While its internal 825GB SSD is soldered straight onto the PS5’s mainboard, you’ll also find there’s an M.2 slot for additional SSDs underneath the main white cover. The same slot we PC folk currently have on our motherboards for connecting NVMe SSDs to it. Handy!
The video itself is a fascinating watch if you fancy staring at the innards of Sony’s upcoming console while listening to the calm and soothing explanation of SIE’s Yasuhiro Ootori (their vice president of the mechanical design department of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s hardware design division) and the very ASMR tap-tap-click of his tiny screwdrivers - just remember to turn on the caption button so you can get those all-important subtitles.
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In it, you’ll see that Sony have designed the swishy white, blade-like covers of the PS5 so they can be removed at home without the need for any kind of tools. Underneath, you’ll quickly spy a small grey cover above the Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray drive, which houses that all-important M.2 slot. You’ll need a screwdriver to remove the cover, but once that’s done it looks like you’ll be able to slot those NVMe SSDs straight in without much trouble.
If you want to expand the storage ofMicrosoft’s Xbox Series X, on the other hand, you’ll have to buy a specialcustom 1TB expansion card from Seagate, which costs a rather eye-watering£220/$220.
“Having said that, we are comparing apples and oranges, though, because that commercial M.2 drive will have its own architecture, its own flash controller and so on. […] That commercial M.2 drive also needs to physically fit inside the bay we created in PlayStation 5 for M.2 drives. Unlike internal hard drives, there’s unfortunately no standard for the height of an M.2 drive, and some M.2 drives have giant heatsinks. In fact, some of them even have their own fans.
Indeed, no SSD manufacturer has started marketing their new PCIe 4.0 drives as PS5 compatible yet (unlike the spate of new gaming headset announcements recently), although if I had to guess I’d be surprised if Samsung’s 980 Pro and WD’s Black SN850 didn’t make the cut. Neither have chunky heatsinks to worry about, and their top speeds of up to 7000MB/s sequential read and 5000MB/s sequential write (or 5300MB/s in the SN850’s case) should hopefully be enough to satisfy Sony’s benchmark requirements. Still, we won’t know for sure until Sony publish that official list.
The PlayStation 5 is due tolaunch on November 12thin the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea, and November 19th in the rest of the world. It will cost £360 / €400 / $400 if you go for the discless digital edition, or £450 / €500 / $500 if you opt for the regular one.
