Sunday, February 28th 2021
Sony Reportedly Planning To Enable Storage Upgrades on PS5 in Summer
The Sony PlayStation 5 comes with an internal 825 GB PCIe 4.0 SSD which offers around 667 GB of usable storage for games and other content. With new games such as the latest Call Of Duty easily taking over 100 GB the need for more storage has never been more evident. Sony has prepared for this eventuality by including an internal M.2 drive bay on the PS5 to expand the available storage. The shift to ultra-fast storage on this latest generation of consoles has limited their ability to support external storage as new games developed for the consoles will expect a certain level of performance. Sony will reportedly enable software support for the M.2 slot with a limited selection of tested PC drives to ensure these minimum performance requirements are achieved. The approach by Sony differs from that of Microsoft who has created a proprietary connector for storage upgrades.
Source:
Bloomberg
44 Comments on Sony Reportedly Planning To Enable Storage Upgrades on PS5 in Summer
Power down, insert drive, power up and play.
Though I'd rather Sony relax their restriction of PS5 games launching exclusively from the internal SSD, provided they are launching from the M2 slot. I mean, they're going through the trouble of certifying SSDs and limiting access so only that have been certified can be used, might as well let people run their games from the M2 slot.A reply that lets me just insert this little article, perfect.
www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-10-why-nintendo-switch-games-are-ending-up-more-expensive
But the gist of it is that the "game cartridges" were expensive, so Switch games were more expensive than their counterparts from other stores/platforms.
Just a hypothetical in case someone can afford a PS5 AND a 10TB NVMe drive. :roll:
We don't even know what kind of file system that thing uses...
And you KNOW that people are gunna shove the cheapest nastiest shit that fits in the socket - look at all the garbage USB 2.0 drives people threw on their PS4/Xbox consoles
Agreed with Mussels. I'd be expecting someone shoving in a SATA M2 drive for sure and then complaining about how slow it is.
One of the reasons for fast SSD was to reduce VRAM usage (as well as installation size, at the moment games like GTA 5 have about 30 copies of most popular assets, to optimize loading from old school media, including traditional HDDs)
Imagine assets being loaded as you turn around or enter another room.
The more you can load at once, the more assets you can afford to load that way.
Though, at the very least it seems that new games targeting the Xbox Series X will run just fine from either internal storage or the expansion card.
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Then again, there are probably very few instances where the console would use both drives intensively at the same time...
The problem is they are way more expensive than optical media and used to have much lower capacity, that's why until very recently optical media was the defacto standard for consoles, but it was only from 1995 with exceptions like the N64 and portable consoles.
Nvme drives are not remotely near to become the standard storage for gaming distribution, not by a long shot. They are ultra expensive for what console companies consider. I don't think we will see that for 1 or 2 generations.