A little bit disheartening news for Sony PS5 lovers, while the new blazing fast SSD storage, one of the fastest solid-state drives, can load virtual worlds with much greater speed, it has its con, it is not big storage and you cannot expand it on day one.
While there is an internal slot where you can fit standard stick-shaped M.2 SSDs, the slot will be disabled and this feature will be added later on via a future update, Sony said. This news shouldn’t come as a surprise to Sony PS5 fans as Playstation hardware architect Mark Cerny has already talked about this disruption in a technical preview in March, he stated that the update is likely to come a bit past the launch and warned interested people to not buy the M.2 drives sometime soon.
According to Cerny, there are a few compatibility issues between the M.2 SSDs and Sony PS5 regarding the former being not fast enough, not thin enough to fit into the SSD bay, and also not compatible with Sony’s I/O controller, however, all these issues will be reviewed by a compatibility testing later this year.
Cerney further suggested that off-the-shelf SSDs have to comply with delivering more than 5.5GB/sec of bandwidth over a PCIe Gen4 connection and they are also required to not have a giant heatsink to be able to fit into the PS5’s drive bay.
Not a single one out of a handful of PCIe Gen4 stick drive manufacturers have been able to assure Cerny that those drives will be compatible with the Sony PS5, however, there are several optimistic people too who are hoping to test it for themselves as soon as they are given a chance.
Meanwhile, you have to be extremely careful while managing your PS5 storage of approximately 667GB(source-leaks).To understand more clearly, let’s look at some of the sizes of these following Sony PS5 games:
1) SackBoy: A Big Adventure: 32 GB
2) Spider-Man: Miles Morales: 50 GB
3) Spider-Man; Miles Morales Ultimate Launch Edition: 105GB 4) Demon’s Souls: 66 GB
5) Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War: 133GB
If you buy all these games, you have already exhausted half of your drive space.
However, this problem is not only restricted to PS5, Microsoft is also going with solid-state drives for its 1TB Xbox Series X(802 GB) and 512GB Xbox Series S(364GB).
USB external storage is supportable on all of these consoles and Cerny explains that due to this, it will be easier to add PS4 games to Sony PS5. Microsoft will let you play Xbox One, Xbox 360, and OG Xbox games from USB 3.1 storage.
Since the Sony PS4 and Xbox One, you have to install big disc-based games to a drive, it will be unwise to think that you won’t require all of the internal storage. The disc just saves you from downloading these games in bits and acts as a key.
On a good note, let’s keep our eyes on the update promised by Cerny which will dissolve all of these compatibility issues.
