One of PS5's Best and Most Popular SSDs Now Has an Even Better Successor

The 1TB WB Black SSD has been great for me this past year. I knew it would fill up quick, so I purchased a 5TB external drive for PS5 games I've completed. I prefer to have all of my games downloaded and ready to play at anytime, so I plan on upgrading to a 4TB SSD soon.
Especially since I see them on sale all the time.

big chunk of money when people are on the bread line

@brubeck it's a luxury item, as is gaming really. Nobody's forced to buy them.
Personally, for the spec and tech in those drives vs other memory (micro sd cards) they're a bargain.

Might pick one up. How much of a performance boost can I expect compared to the stock SSD? I reckon at least a few seconds (depending on game, of course), its theoretical speeds are quite a bit faster after all.

@brubeck
Yeah, I’ll just finish my games and delete them as normal. Can’t imagine ever needing to play 30+ at once anyway 🤷‍♂️

If it’s faster that could be some benefit, but the stock SSD is so fast for loading it seems pointless, plus games will be designed for the stock unit if streaming environments directly anyway.

If these go on sale, I may pick them up, but real-world testing suggest you are getting a very minor upgrade in speed and performance especially using it in a console and considering its still using pcie 4. Kinda feels like WD are just grasping at FOMO dollars here, as it is a win-win either way/ People buy the SN850 when it gets further discounts or existing owners buy this "new" version out of FOMO.

I only wish I had gotten the 2 tb SN850 at this point but the 1tb has performed great. Maybe this will force the price down of the SN850 models and I can grab that 2tb at a decent price.

Nothing like promotion for push square! I went with a Kingston fury renegade 1tb for £109 and that's been fine. Not sure what the extra £70 is for other than branding...

Ever since I have faster internet and games don't take that long to install or download any more and I don't play many games at once anyway, I haven't had the need to get an additional SSD. Doubt I'll ever will.

I'll pick one up years down the line when the PS5 is considered retro. Did the same with the PS3, swapping the storage for a 2TB hard drive that only costed me like $60 and could fit my entire library of games.

@ATaco Lol that'll be 2029 then, were still in the ps4 era

@Blofse you noticed any speed issues? Give us a mini-review pls

I just store everything on a 5tb external and the game im playing is on the internal

I remember thinking (and probably saying) the first thing I'd buy when I got a PS5 was an SSD but after 10-11 months of use I've found that just having a standard external is sufficient enough for my needs.

So maybe if I see the SN850 below $100 w/ heat sink I might grab it but otherwise I'm good.

These are gonna fall in price quickly before the end of the year with PCIe 5.0 stuff releasing.

Gosh darn it! I bought a 1TB SN850 only 2 weeks ago! 😂
I'll just have to survive its "paltry" speeds 😜

@Relygon mit really a performe
boost. It performs mostly the same as the internal Ssd.

@Reeneman Despite being significantly faster? That sucks. What’s the bottleneck, PCIe Gen4?

@theMEGAniggle sure. It's insignificantly slower than my friend's one, but only by about 2%, so for the price, it's definitely worth it. I also didn't buy a heatsink - I went with the one provided (in built) and had no issues there.
Copying from the ps5 was fast and like most drives it runs slightly faster than the ps5's internal memory.
Had it about a month, no complaints so far.

im holding out for the 8tb 😂 ive a 1tb m.2 in my pc and a 18tb hdd does all i need for steam.

To be honest, growing up playing C64 cassettes, any, couple of second improvement is pretty much negated for me.. the older version is fine for me at this time...

@Smiffy01
And I'm perfectly fine with waiting that long. As I said, I just bought a 2TB hard drive for my PS3 last year. Technology evolves so quickly that within a couple years you'll find what was once top of the line stuff for dirt cheap.

700 $ us for a 4tb, ouch, i wish newgen thought of a better solution, reasonable price.

I got a samsung 980pro with heatsink for my birthday from my wife. 1tb.
It works perfectly.
So the rest of the gen that will be it.

@Blofse thanks man! Sounds like no real difference, think I’ll check this one out.

@Jtheripper because this is commodity hardware it'll come down in price as the market dictates.

The fact that the latest computers support gen 5 and this is gen 4 means that within a year or two things will come down further. The reason why XBox storage expansion is cheaper per terabyte is because it's only gen 3, but as the fab processes move on then gen 3 storage isn't going to get any cheaper (if anything it'll be more expensive due to lower manufacturing volume), so while Microsoft's strategy looks better at the start of the generation, Sony's will pull ahead significantly soon.

Backwards Compatibility means that you'd be able to use gen 4 and 5 chips in either console, but on Xbox there's the added complication of adapting it to their proprietary interface, and both consoles will be limited to the speed of their storage interface. This means that Xbox Series is limited to gen 3 speeds (which it currently reaches) and PlayStation 5 is limited to gen 4 speeds (which it's approaching, and has a theoretical maximum speed of double gen 3) so when gen 5 starts to become mainstream (with again double the theoretical speed of gen 4) then NAND packages and controllers that saturate both previous generation interfaces should be pretty cheap, meaning that you're paying the extra with Xbox to get half as fast storage in a proprietary form factor.