PS5 Doesn't Like It When You Put an Extra NVMe SSD Inside

Slow news day guys? Ha.

Looking forward to this being unlocked though, surprised it’s taking this long.

Sounds like me after a pint of diesel.

Good news: Space is extending in this summer.
Bad news: SSD is so expensive still this summer.

I can imagine them never unlocking this

@Arugula The original SSD is soldered according to iFixit, so you can't replace it without a good hot air station, and good ones cost more than a good soldering iron. The Xbox Series X and S both have socketed SSD but the Series S one is a shorter length than most NVMe SSD, and I have no idea how lenient MS is about putting in a 3rd party SSD. I've seen an old SSD die at work so I know like spinning disks solid state also have a finite lifetime. Good news is the PS6 will probably be out by then, and maybe a PS5 slim will return to NVMe sockets.

@Arugula there's an expansion slot. Once it's enabled it will be really easy to install extra SSD space. Just waiting for Sony to unlock it and advise which SSDs are compatible.

Gotta wait for SSD drives to come down in first before I get one. Plus I have ample space due to external drive plus lower file sizes

"Sony has said that it will unlock access to the PlayStation 5’s M.2 slot later this summer"

Sure they will.

Probably a daft question but why wasn’t it unlocked from the beginning?

@fR_eeBritney
None certified by Sony is available. Maybe they didn't want people to try some random stuff and then complain their PS5 isn't working (is broken)
🤷‍♂️

Slow news day? This has been known since around the launch when DF originally tried it.

My 8Tb external will work for me. It still has over 4Tb of free space on it. Do you know how many games I can buy with the money I can save by not buying internal expansion SSD!

What is taking Sony so long? Plug NVMe drive into test/dev kit, run benchmarks, publish list of drives. Or am I missing something?
Either way, an NVMe drive isn't anywhere near as optimised as the PS5's internal drive so you're going to get potential glitches/pauses/stuttering with whatever drive you put in there.

@The_New_Butler there is one Black WD SN850 NVMe drive I have seen compatible just not white listed by Sony yet.

Maybe Sony is waiting to turn it on until they start selling their own drives that work?

Have they ever officially stated they WON'T sell their own SSD or did they just say off the shelf drives would work?

Did they actually say they will enable it this summer? I thought that was some unofficial unconfirmed report.

Well that was a waste of bandwidth really...i'm guessing sony are testing all possible drives to make sure that any 3rd party drive wont brick the system...i'll wait for an official product..

I want to use the ssd extension as soon as possible.

@itsfoz i wouldnt get your hopes up, 1tb ssd for xbox series s or x is £220 so expect the same price point, a 2tb will be around the price of the console, and i am pretty sure the scalpers will be buying up all the stock.

@The_New_Butler "and it turned out the opposite way round."

Well it started opposite, still have another 5 or 6 more years to go, a lot can change. OK maybe not a lot, but some things can, especially 3rd party accessories.

Imagine if a car company did that
"Oh, we'll make the trunk accessible soon. Follow our tweets for updates"
I don't see why it wasn't available at launch. Did they rush the console? If turning on the extra ssd slot is just a flick of a switch, what happens if it gets turned back off, due to an update, etc. Do we lose data?

Can’t wait to add at least additional 1tb to my ps5, 600gb is just not enough, I have ps5 only for a couple of month and I already filled most of ps5 ssd.

Another day and more clickbait.

Seems to be a lot of what gets posted anymore.

When I shop around for an internal SSD, a 2TB Crucial is around $200, and when I shop around for an NvME, at 2TB they are only around another $30, so $250 ish, depending on brand. Seems like a fair price for the lifespan and performance of the drives.

NINJA APPROVED

@wiiware Make sure you leave at least 10-20% of your drive empty, so you can get the fullest lifespan out of the drive possible.

I'm waiting to buy one once Sony gives the green light on approved drives. They won't be cheap though, but i want 1TB otherwise not worth it.

@BloodNinja I think I have about 40gb storage free, so about 5% from ps5 800gb ssd 😅

@wiiware Yeah, games are getting so big these days. You will want to eventually upgrade your storage, and then do your best to keep 10-20% of open space on each drive. If you do that, the drives should last 15-20 years or more!

@The_New_Butler well that is fair enough, I was going go quote that a while ago Push Square did an article on the announced M.2 card I mentioned. Anyway guess we will know come the summer, happy days.

I tired putting a small frozen tortilla in the CD slot and it won't boot. Maybe I need to wait for a firmware update?

With external ps5 storage being added this week I’m probably going to be skipping internal nvme expansion.

@PhhhCough It's not available yet because there are no drives that match the spec of the internal ssd. If they enabled it there wouldn't be anything that would actually be able to work at the moment.

@Arugula Really if you have a COD installed it will go really fast. And i like to play COD a with other games.

@Orpheus79V
The Samsung 980 Pro meets the specs, but until Sony publish an official list, we don't know what is 100% supported.

It has to do with thermals apparently.
They are testing which m2 brands and models will be supported, and making sure they adjust the fan speeds to compensate for the extra heat generated.
Update will drop between June-August apparently.

"it’s worth noting that the drives expected to be supported are seriously expensive"

Same deal on the Series X, but at least those were available and working at launch.

I think the M.2 SSD expansion slot on the PS5 not being enabled at launch at all is partly the sign of an unfinished product being brought to market. If it were done it would have launched with expansion options available.

@Vincent294

"The original SSD is soldered according to iFixit, so you can't replace it without a good hot air station, and good ones cost more than a good soldering iron"

Yes but even if doing that there's no guarantee the PS5 OS would know how to address the extra storage space, or even boot at all. Potentially the size limits are hardcoded into the OS - without any data it's impossible to tell.

I still find it funny that Sony's new flagship games console (PS5) launched with much less storage space than their previous flagship (PS4 Pro) - seems like a step backwards, perhaps made to help keep costs down because they're at that point of losing money on every one built and sold, and will be for a while longer.

@The_New_Butler As long as players see unfinished products with pretty graphics and hundreds of useless cosmetic items and think "I really need that at launch!" then the companies will continue to sell unfinished products with space issues.

@Arugula I know in the end if we can get the extra storage nobody will complain. 😉

@The_New_Butler Yeah I'm not saying the PS5 OS and core design is bad - although if I'm honest it's pretty iterative compared to the PS4, more tweaks they could have implemented on that system than something groundbreaking, beyond integrating the heavily-pushed-by-Sony Cards, soon-to-be-ignored Accolades and the actually-quite-useful Tips and Tricks (although this relies on whether the developer can be bothered to do it - in my experience just having a laptop open with YouTube reveals plenty of fan created content that shows you how to get through tricky sections etc) it's not reinventing the wheel, although it is fairly attractive. Same old Sony problem though - horribly organised menu systems. This is true on their cameras, their TVs and anything else I've used; nothing is in a logical place at all, it's scattershotted all over the place.

I'm in the minority of people who actually quite like the interface of the One and Series consoles - the layout is more logical, jumping between games/apps/settings is really easily and I don't ever feel I'm wasting minutes at a time searching for something. It's all pretty polished. It's based on Windows 10, but I don't get ticked off like it like I do with the desktop UI of W10.

While there's no doubting the PS5's internal SSD chips are blazing fast, they're too small. We are 100% guaranteed to see models that address the complaints about the console's size in terms of both physical size being too big (it's more huge than original XBOX HEUG) and ironically internal storage space being too small. Incidentally they could do with improving the internal airflow for the console as well - I saw a teardown and temperature test on a YouTube video channel who do these kinds of things regularly and the conclusion was that when a game is playing, the PS5 is cooking it's rear-mounted RAM chips at a toasty 95ºc when really as a rule anything above 70ºc is too hot for RAM chips and can lead to shortened lifespan and potentially memory-corruption related crashes.

@Richnj Very well said! It's funny how Cyberpunk 2077 was taken down from the PS Store for being a buggy, unfinished and feature-reduced product while Sony had just released an entire games console that was a buggy (remember all the sleep crashes causing external storage to need "repairing"?) , unfinished and feature-reduced product themselves. Pretty hypocritical when you think about it.

@Arugula I do not think the PS5 original ssd is even replaceable. It is definitely not m.2 as its soldered to the motherboard

@Orpheus79V ahhhhhh, gotcha.

@The_New_Butler I have 4 games on my PS5 archiving others on my external for quick transfer to my PS5 is a better solution than dropping $250+ for me.

@airhead190 I wonder if it's using some kind of proprietary communication bus method that Sony developed, i.e. Cerny's team.

It's funny to think that not so long ago, they'd basically engineer and produce a lot of custom chips or custom solutions either on their own or in conjunction with other companies (MIPS processors in the PS1/PSP/Vita, EE/GS in the PS2, Cell processor in the PS3) and since the PS4 era it's been a lot more off-the-shelf stock PC components.

@JohnKarnes Agreed. The important thing to remember is that although the storage amount is limited, it beats the hell out of the long load times and dirty/damaged disc problems of PS1-PS3 era gaming where we were hamstrung by optical storage media. Now we're beyond hard drives and onto SSDs which is getting gaming closer back to the cartridge era where we saw instantaneous load times, like in the 80s and 90s except with magnitudes more complex graphics/sound/AI...

Just imagine a distant post-apo future, where the read/write cycles of that internal SSD are maxed out...the PS4 battery drama is nothing compared to what lies ahead of us

And gamers don't like it when we can't put an extra NVMe SSD inside.

Actually It's good enough for me to be able to off load games onto an external SSD. I mean, I won't be playing like 3-4 games concurrently anyway...
But idk, maybe other people do switch between multiple games on daily basis...

@The_New_Butler Mid-range speeds. You really don't need bleeding edge speed for SSDs/NvMEs anyway. Even lower-end devices are more than enough. Save your money and go mid-range; I have those types of drives on all my PCs, PS3 and PS4 and my load times are all below 7 seconds, depending on the game.

NINJA APPROVED

@The_New_Butler I'm talking about internal SSDs/NVmE's. You can't install your own NVmE on a PS5? I thought they were adding that functionality soon? Isn't there a second drive bay inside the PS5?

@The_New_Butler Ah, sounds like a Sony problem. Glad I waited on buying a PS5, it seems to be more problems than it’s worth.

@The_New_Butler then why bother with this type of expansion storage in the first place if Sony knows they are not up to spec for ps5? Maybe a more cheaper and more compatible opion would have been better than this mess.