Sony finally officially confirmed that the PlayStation 5 (PS5) will be coming to Malaysia on 11 Dec, much to delight of many PS fans as it sold out almost immediately the moment they were open for pre-order. One of the biggest draws of the PS5 is its fast solid-state drive (SSD), that is touted to make loading virtual worlds much quicker than the PS4 ever could.
Now, the PS5 comes with an 825GB SSD, but not all that space is accessible for users to download all their games and media onto. In reality, the amount of usable space is just 667.2GB according to a report by Polygon.
Now, you might think that shouldn’t be a problem. After all, the PS5 has a dedicated slot that fits a standard M.2 SSD that’s easy to access as it demonstrated in Sony’s teardown video. Check out 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 won’t be able to use that expansion slot during the console’s launch. Apparently, the feature is “reserved for a future update” according to Sony.
Granted, this news shouldn’t come as a complete shocker as PlayStation hardware architect Mark Cerny mentioned back in March that support for the slot would come “a bit past” launch.
Cerny explained that Sony decided to delay the roll of the feature because not every M.2 SSD on the market may be compatible with the PS5. The worry is that some SSDs may not be fast enough to keep with the PS5’s SSD speed. Sony said it will be doing some compatibility testing with current M.2 drives on the market to make sure the architecture of particular drives play well with PS5 games.
Another reason he cited was because there is no standard height for M.2 drives and certain drives may be taller or have giant heat sinks that won’t fit in the PS5’s SSD bay. You can check out his detailed explanation in this video from 20:00 to about 23:00.
This means that PS5 owners will have to carefully manage the amount of storage space on their console and make the best use of the over 600GB of usable storage space. Curious what is the size of the average PS5 game?
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 is 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.
There is, however, some good news. Because the PS5 is backwards compatible with PS4 games, gamers can easily plug in an external HDD with their PS4 games into the PS5 to begin playing them right away. This way, players need not worry about their old PS4 games taking up precious SSD space on the PS5.
In case you were wondering, you can’t load PS5 games on an HDD and play it off from it. You will still need to load it on 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 would be wrong. Even on the current generation of consoles, a vast majority of disc-based games still need to be installed on the console’s drive.
So, what do you think? Are you disappointed that Sony isn’t enabling the PS5 to take advantage of its expandable SSD storage bay at launch? How will you manage your game library with such limited space? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.
[SOURCE]
