The PS5 SSD is small and at launch without any games on it, you have around 664GB of free space. Yes, you can use an external HDD or SSD to store your games on but PS5 games need to be on the internal SSD in order to launch them. Up to now, if you have been hoping to slot an M.2 Gen4 SSD into your console then you are out of luck. Sony confirmed that the console won’t support PS4 SSD expansion upgrades at launch as the company plans on rolling out the feature at a later date.
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While the PS5 does include a free slot to place a very specific M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSD into it, it won’t be active until Sony enabled it through a firmware update. They told The Verge that the feature is “reserved for a future update”. However, this comes as no surprise. While Sony has been rather quiet about the whole upgradable storage situation, Mark Cerny did say during the original Road to PS5 showcase that the support for expandable storage would arrive “a bit past launch.”
Keep in mind that the company is also waiting to see which manufacturers are able to produce these compatible drives before announcing official solutions which consumers can go out and buy. Mark mentioned that users would need a compatible SSD drive that is capable of 5.5GB/sec of bandwidth over PCIe Gen4 in order for it to work on the PS5. In addition, it cannot have heatsinks on the hardware either else it won’t fit into the console. The latest Western Digital drives, for example, while they have Gen4 support, the includes an encased heatsink and the other does not.
According to The Verge, multiple SSD manufacturers claimed that Sony’s PS5 SSD testing program has not even kicked off yet. However, several of them claim their latest drives will meet Sony’s requirements. So what are you going to pay for these drives when they do arrive and support the PS5? Well, we are not really sure right now. When they do launch, the SSD landscape might shift a bit which could see prices drop.
