Although PlayStation 5 comes with 825GB of storage, only 667.2GB can be used for games. If you’re a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Destiny 2 player, these two games alone will eat 396GB of your storage. If you were also to try ARK: Survival Evolved with all the DLCs, you’re looking at another 275GB, meaning your entire PlayStation 5 storage has more or less been eaten up by only three games (and their DLCs).
Unless you’re ready to constantly delete and download/re-download games, an SSD storage upgrade feels necessary. If like me, you like to have games stored on your system then go back to them periodically, or alternatively if you play a few games at the same time, having to re-download large files every time you’d like to play one of your favourites is less than ideal. And that’s to say nothing of the time it takes to download 200GB+ if you don’t have a super-fast connection.
As such, you might also not want to consider SSDs that are under 1TB. Their read and write speed might be lower than your PS5 in addition to not offering that much more space, especially for AAA games and some e-sports.
Do you really need an SSD, or can you just buy an external HDD for storage?
Technically, you can just get an external HDD for storage, but you will not be able to run the games from the external HDD, as the external hard drive would be way too slow for PlayStation 5. You will still need to move your games around to your SSD to get them to play, so investing in an HDD isn’t ideal and it doesn’t really solve the initial problem of low storage space in any meaningful capacity.
The PS5 comes equipped with an SSD of a rather impressive speed of about 5.5GB per second, making it about 100 times (yes 100 times!) faster than what the PlayStation 4 can achieve.
To put that into perspective, PS5’s bandwidth is at least 5.5GB per second (compressed can reach up to 9GB), while the bandwidth on PS4 between 50 to 100MB per second. PlayStation 4 can load 1GB in 20 seconds, while a PlayStation 5 can load 2GB in 0.27 seconds. HDD simply cannot compete with an SSD
What type of SSD do you need for PlayStation 5?
PlayStation 5 comes equipped with NVMe SSD, which is the type of SSD that is compatible and the one that you’ll need to expand the storage. There is a space inside the PlayStation 5 where you can install an SSD, and removing the cover and installing it will not void the warranty. That is, if you follow the instructions set out by Sony. You can find more information here.
There are a range of SSDs that are compatible with your PS5 and they vary in speed and storage, so choosing the perfect one for you will depend on how much you play, what types of games you play and your budget.
The Holy Trinity of the best compatible SSDs for PlayStation 5 are the Samsung 980 Pro, Seagate FireCuda 530 and WD Black SN850.
The choice of which one would be the best for you will entirely depend on your budget and the speed you’re looking for. You probably don’t want an SSD that is slower than the one that is in your PS5, so you ought to be looking at 5.5GB/s and up.
Below are our selections for the best 1TB and over for your New Year PlayStation 5 upgrade. Please note that we’ve excluded SSDs that are better suited to servers, or those that have a large storage but are slow, such as the Corsair MP400 8TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD.
While the Corsair MP 400 SSD has large storage of 8TB, the speed of the SSD is actually below that of the PlayStation 5, with a read speed of 3.4GB. As discussed above, the read speed of your PlayStation 5 is actually 5.5GB, so aim for that read speed or higher with your upgrade.