As some of you might know if you’ve been following the channel recently, I’ve been
on a bit of an SSD crusade. Mostly because staring at the big numbers when I transfer
equally big files satisfies a part of me I never knew existed way more than it probably
should.
And it’s a feeling that a lot of PS5 owners probably also feel thanks to the console’s
own, custom-built SSD. But with games *cough* Warzone *cough* becoming bigger and bigger,
and each update threatening to cut a gaming session in half depending on your connection
speed, the need for a quick and easy storage upgrade has never been higher.
Which is where Crucial comes in. They know better than most that the storage struggle
can be real, and that upgrading your PS5’s storage on your own can be a little intimidating.
So they decided to sponsor this video where I’ll guide you through the whole process,
step by step, including the installation of an M.2 heatsink, and we’ll run some tests
to see if there are any differences to watch out for.
So, let’s get started.
Now, being a PC hardware focussed channel, and not having Linus-levels of cash to throw
at my problems, I don’t actually have a PS5. But, shoutout to my unpaid and understandably
nervous intern who not only has one, but for some reason decided to trust me with it for
this video. I definitely didn’t spend most of my time with it finally playing Bloodborne.
I promise.
Okay, so back when Sony released the PS5 patch that enabled storage expansion using M.2 SSDs,
they also detailed a few requirements for said SSDs, since they have to be both fast,
and small enough to fit in the console.
Firstly, it has to be an M.2 SSD, M.2 being a form factor, or a fancy way of saying one
of these small boys. It also needs to support PCIe Gen 4, have a capacity between 250GB
and 4TB, and needs to read data at a speed of 5500 MB/s or more. Luckily The PS5 supports
pretty much all of the M.2 SSD sizes out there, so I wouldn’t worry about that.
Crucial’s new P5 Plus meets all of these requirements, with it being an M.2, PCIe 4.0
SSD with capacities ranging from 500GB to 2TB, read speeds of 6600MB/s or faster, and
comes fully loaded with a 5-year warranty and a host of reliability and security features
tossed in as a bonus. It’s also priced very competitively at $145 for the 1TB version
here, or R3,800 for my fellow South Africans at Takealot via the link in the description.
Now, you’re also going to want to grab an M.2 heatsink if your drive doesn’t come
with one in the box like our P5 Plus here. But luckily those are really cheap nowadays.
Just make sure that the total height of the drive with a heatsink attached is no more
than 11.25mm, and no wider than 25mm. Something like this cooler from Thermal Grizzly should
do the trick.
Okay, with that out of the way, let’s fusion dance these things together already.
All we’ll be needing for this operation is our hands or a friend’s hands if you
don’t have any with you, a relatively small star/phillips head screwdriver, or if you’re
like me and don’t care about rules, a small flat head will work just fine too.
First off we need to flip the console over with the PlayStation logo facing down, and
with the HDMI and power ports on the left.
Then comes the scariest part of the process, for me at least, removing the side panel.
You do that by lifting the top-left corner of the cover with your left hand, and sliding
the cover to the left with your right hand. Just be careful not to do it too aggressively,
or you’ll launch the cover across the room. Not that that’s happened to me or anything.
Now that we have a good view of some of the console’s secret bits, we’ll be focussing
on this panel over here, which is where the screwdriver comes in. Unscrew the cover plate,
and slide it out to the right to gain access to where the real fun happens.
Putting the console aside for a minute, we’ll be attaching the heatsink to the P5 Plus,
so if your drive already has a compatible one attached, skip this part.
First, we’ll need to attach the included thermal pads to the heatsink itself, starting
with the thinner bottom one. Ideally, you’d want to keep the protective plastic attached
on one side of the pad to make sticking it in the right spot easier, but if you’re
like me then you’ve probably already removed both of those, you maverick you.
With that in place, grab the sleek Crucial P5 Plus boi and position it on top of the
pad with the crucial logo facing up, and the left of the drive with the half-moon divot
sitting flush with the left of the heatsink. If you do it right, the gold contacts on the
right of the drive should jutt out a little.
Next, attach the thicker thermal pad to the flat side of the other half of the heatsink,
just like you did with the other thermal pad. If you don’t get it on the first try, just
be careful when removing the thermal pad as they tear pretty easily.
After that’s done, plop the top half of the heatsink on top of the P5 Plus, again
making sure it sits flush with the left of the drive and bottom half of the heatsink,
leaving the gold contacts exposed. Then just apply some light pressure to squish the sandwich
together and it’s ready to go.
Now, back to the PS5’s secret M.2 hidey-hole, you’ll need to remove the screw on the right
of the slot with your screwdriver, then take the little metal spacer and place it in the
hole next to the number 80, and make sure it’s in properly.
Next we get to the good stuff. Grab your SSD with the gold contacts facing away from the
metal spacer, and lightly push the SSD into the corresponding slot on the left.
Once it’s in place securely, hold the SSD down with your left hand so that it sits flush
with the spacer, then grab the screw we took out earlier and drop that into the spacer
and screw it in.
Cool, job done. Now we just replace the heat shield by sliding it in from the right, and
screw it down. Then just take the PS5’s side cover and position it slightly to the
left of the console, and slide it back on. Simple as that.
Well, sort of. All that’s left to do is get it set up, and for that the PS5 will require
you to format the drive first, which will remove any and all data you might have on
the drive so make sure you don’t have anything on there you don’t want to lose.
The format process is super quick thankfully, but the console might give you a warning at
the end of it saying that the drive might not be fast enough, and giving you a much
lower read speed than the drive is actually capable of. If you do get the warning, you
can pretty safely ignore it.
After that, the SSD should be ready to go, and you can start freeing up space on the
console by moving your games from PS5 storage to your new SSD. To do that, head to settings,
then go to storage, then console storage, then games and apps, and then just pick the
games you want to move and move them. Simples.
The moving process from console storage to the SSD is very quick, with none of the games
I moved taking longer than 50 seconds. The future is here, man. Unfortunately moving
games from the SSD back to console storage takes about three times longer in my case,
but that’s still plenty fast, and you’re probably not going to feel the need to do
that anyway.
Oh, and for those of you concerned about temperatures, as long as you have a heatsink in place, your
SSD should be perfectly fine. Crucial’s P5 only got up to 67 degrees maximum during
my testing, which isn’t nearly high enough to cause any issues.
So, with my lender PS5 now equipped with its speedy new SSD, is there any difference between
running games from the M.2 SSD and running them directly from the console storage?
Well, from what I’ve seen during my many hours of “testing”, I didn’t notice
any performance issues while running games from the P5 Plus, compared to running the
same games from the internal storage. And that’s kind of the point.
The whole reason Sony gave us a list of requirements, is to make sure that you’re getting about
the same experience no matter where the games are stored. And the same goes for game launch
and loading times.
As you’ll see from these charts, the difference in launch and load times between the PS5’s
internal storage and M.2 storage falls almost perfectly into the margin of error zone, with
there being almost no more than a second separating the two. Which, again, is the whole point.
You shouldn’t be buying a new SSD for your PS5 expecting to see a performance uplift
from it. The PS5’s internal storage is already about as fast as it gets right now, so getting
about the same level of performance is an amazing thing.
The only issue with the PS5’s internal storage is of course its capacity in a world where
we’re all afraid of commitment and incapable of playing just one game at a time, and said
games only getting bigger and bigger, which is why Sony letting us upgrade it with SSDs
like the P5 Plus is a very cool move.
Just like it was a very cool move for Crucial to sponsor this video where we hopefully helped
make your storage upgrade a little easier. If you wanna learn more about Crucial’s
new P5 Plus before grabbing it for your PS5 or as a gift for someone else’s, I’ll
be dropping a link to the official product page down below. Or if you’re in South Africa
and are ready to pull the trigger on it, grab it at Takealot which I’ll also have linked
down below.
A big thanks to everyone watching. If this video helped you out or was at least somewhat
interesting to you, let me know in the comments, hit the like button, get subscribed to see
more of my face, and I’ll catch you all in the next one.
Cheers.