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Sony finally officially confirmed that the PlayStation 5 (PS5) will arrive in Malaysia on December 11, much to the delight of many PS fans, as it sold out almost immediately the moment they were opened for pre-order. One of the PS5’s biggest draws is its fast solid-state drive (SSD), which is touted to make loading virtual worlds much faster than the PS4.
Now the PS5 comes with an 825GB SSD, but not all of that space is accessible for users to download all their games and media. Actually, the amount of usable space is only 667.2 GB according to a Polygon report.
Now, you might think that shouldn’t be a problem. After all, the PS5 has a dedicated slot that fits an easily accessible standard M.2 SSD, as demonstrated in Sony’s teardown video. Watch the video below to see how easy it is to access the PS5’s SSD bay.
But here’s the bad news. Sony confirmed with The Verge that PS5 owners will not be able to use that expansion slot during the console launch. The feature is apparently “reserved for a future update” according to Sony.
Of course, this news shouldn’t come as a total surprise, as PlayStation hardware architect Mark Cerny mentioned in March that support for the slot would come “a little after” launch.
Cerny explained that Sony decided to delay the launch of the feature because not all M.2 SSDs on the market can be compatible with the PS5. The concern is that some SSDs may not be fast enough to keep up with the speed of the PS5’s SSD. Sony said it will do some compatibility testing with current M.2 drives on the market to make sure the architecture of the particular drives works well with PS5 games.
Another reason he cited was because there is no standard height for M.2 drives and some drives may be taller or have giant heat sinks that won’t fit in the PS5’s SSD bay. You can see his detailed explanation in this video from 20:00 to 23:00 approximately.
This means that PS5 owners will have to carefully manage the amount of storage space on their console and make the most of the 600+ GB of usable storage space. Curious to know what the average PS5 game size is?
That really depends. Some games like Bugsnax can be as “small” as 9GB, while large games like Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Launch Edition are a whopping 105GB, taking up 1/6 of the available memory on the SSD. Still, there are even bigger games like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War that take up 133GB of storage space.
However, there is good news. Because the PS5 is backwards compatible with PS4 games, gamers can easily connect an external hard drive with their PS4 games to the PS5 to start playing them right away. This way, gamers need not worry about their old PS4 games taking up valuable SSD space on the PS5.
In case you’re wondering, you can’t load PS5 games onto a hard drive and play it from it. You will still need to load it onto the PS5’s SSD to play it.
One last thing to note, if you are opting for the PS5 with the optical disc drive, thinking that disc-based games won’t take up as much storage space on the PS5’s SSD, you’d be wrong. Even on the current generation of consoles, the vast majority of disk-based games still have to be installed on the console drive.
So what do you think? Are you disappointed that Sony isn’t letting the PS5 take advantage of its expandable SSD storage bay at launch? How will you manage your game library with such limited space? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
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