- [Narrator] Upgrading the PS5 looks messy.
- Strong disagree here.
Microsoft's approach for now limits consumer choice,
costs more, sacrifices performance, and .
It is a lot easier.
It really does take like two seconds.
But I think that assuming that it needs to be that simple
is not giving gamers enough credit
and that's something Sony did well.
Sure their documentation could probably be better.
But the actual process of upgrading the storage
of the PlayStation Five is not that overwhelming.
Once you're familiar with a few simple principles.
And once we've walked you through it,
you will be ready to upgrade the SSD,
whether it's your game console,
PC, car, microwave or whatever.
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The first key advantage of Sony's PS 5 storage system
is also its greatest weakness, choice.
Thanks to its industry standard M.2 22110 slot.
The PS 5 can physically accept most SSDs on the market.
Everything from the most mundane consumer drive
to exotic data center drives with Optane memory on them,
at least physically.
In a very PC like turn of events.
Sony's compatibility messaging has gotten
somewhat complicated and the thing is,
while any of these drives might fit.
You can't just go to Newegg or Amazon punch in M.2 SSD
order the cheapest thing and expect it to work.
Only drives rated for a sustained read speed
of 5,500 megabytes per second or greater
are officially supported.
So that immediately disqualifies any SATA M.2 drives
as well as PCI express Gen three drives.
Since PCI express Gen four is required to hit speeds
anywhere from 3,500 megabytes per second,
all the way up to 7,000 megabytes per second.
Single and double-sided drives are both supported though.
And all of this is great news for consumer choice
because in the longterm competition will put pressure
on SSD makers to provide solutions that will meet
the PS 5's performance standards at a fair price.
Now Microsoft has had the upper hand thus far,
Sony is only just now betaing this upgrade program.
Well, Microsoft co-branded Seagate storage expansion card
has been available pretty much since day one
for X-Box with big game libraries.
But the ball is now in Sony's court.
'Cause $220 is already today
stupidly high for a wimpy two lane NVMe SSD.
When I can get a top of the line,
Samsung 980 Pro for $20 less.
And the situation is only going to keep getting worse.
If nothing puts pressure on Seagate.
Although to Microsoft's credit their boot storage.
So the drive installed inside the Xbox
is in the form of an M.2 SSD
that can be easily replaced if for whatever reason
it needed to be serviced
Sony on the other hand
while their internal storage is soldered.
So if it dies you're SOL,
unless you wanna completely replace the main board.
And additionally,
you can't quite put in just anything you want.
Your SSD has to be between 250 gigs and four terabytes.
But the thing is,
even if I'm not allowed to put my whopping thousand dollar
eight terabyte SSD today,
theoretically nothing would prevent me from installing it
in the future as more options become available.
So overall Sony's approach is a huge win for consumer choice
and don't believe anyone who has it tells you
that it's too hard or too scary.
It's actually really easy.
All you'll need is your SSD of choice,
a number one Phillips screwdriver.
And of course your PlayStation five.
Start by laying it down on its side,
lifting this corner here and sliding towards the base
where it stands.
Whoop, it actually comes off that easily.
Simply loosen this screw right here.
Try not to lose it.
Loosen this second screw.
Then you see this little ring right here.
Oh, regrettably that's not magnetic.
You wanna put this on the little hole that corresponds
to the length of your SSD
in our case, this is a 2280 SSD.
That means it's 22 millimeters wide and 80 millimeters long.
So we're gonna put this into the 80.
There here we go.
Then we just take our SSD and slot it in at the back.
A little something like this.
So you can go in at an angle till it clicks,
then push it down.
Then we screw in that second screw,
put the heat shield back in place,
reattach the first screw
and put the side panel back on.
It really is that easy, and it only takes that long.
Other than that for now you have to apply
for the beta program in order to participate.
It should be fine I'm beta as (beep).
If your drive has a large cooler
that prevents it from fitting
in the PlayStation Five's SSD bay,
you can remove it,
but you should check with your manufacturer
to ensure that it will still be able to operate safely.
Random thought, what would prevent you from just
installing the SSD with its Big Chungus is heatsink on it
and leaving this shield off.
Anyway, let's fire it up.
With our beta key redeemed.
We've restarted the PS5
opened up the system menu and changed the settings
to beta software now like with any beta program
Sony warns us that may be incomplete
or contain bugs and they're not responsible
for any lost data or damaged hardware.
Then we fire the thing up and this is it.
You don't even make it to the home screen.
You will immediately have to choose,
Hey, do you wanna format this M.2 SSD
or do you want to not format and turn the machine off.
Obviously I want to format it.
Now this is interesting.
Data screenshots and video clips cannot be saved
to M.2 storage.
So if you were thinking,
wow, I don't actually wanna install that many games,
but I wanna save a ton of gameplay video clips
and just use the M.2 for that, you cannot.
Let's see how long this takes it.
Shouldn't take very long, pretty toasty storage, fire Kuda.
Oh yeah, that was really fast.
I was just going to peak at this 'cause Seagate told us
it was specifically made with the PlayStation Five in mind,
but I don't see any PlayStation branding anywhere on it,
which kind of makes sense.
And we'll talk about that a little bit more later.
6,500 megabytes a second
installation location, PS5 games and apps M.2 storage
just like that.
Let's install again shall we.
Obviously want the PS 5 version?
This will take a minute.
Well, this is it.
I just thought maybe it would just show me where
it's installed, but Nope, it's completely transparent.
Well, if there was any doubt
that we can move around seamlessly
in a large open world environment, we can put that to rest.
Haven't seen a single stutter,
no discernible poppin or anything like that.
There's enough distortion from the like film grain,
the kind of lens distortion that they do around
the edges of the frame and stuff like that,
that you'd be able to mask a lot of it.
Wow that is very cool.
And very detail, they're all the same.
This is such an unintuitive selector
prioritize image quality or prioritize resolution.
Choose whether to prioritize visual quality or frame rate.
That's not what resolution means.
I think resolution means frame rate,
but I mean a game like this,
they're gonna be loading the whole map anyway.
So I wouldn't expect there to be any difference,
but as expected it works fine.
Oh no.
That's what happens when I don't have other cars to help me.
Oh, they all passed me.
I think there's a lot of assists on right now.
This is like the tutorial.
So everything is totally perfect.
Come on, third pick.
Yes.
Of course all of this is as we expected,
why would Sony roll out this beta?
If they didn't have a pretty good idea
that it was gonna perform as it should.
But what happens if you do not follow Sony's instructions.
To find out, we have prepared a couple of other SSDs
to try including this one right here,
which violates a couple of Sony's guidelines.
This is an eight terabyte SSD
and it is PCI express Gen three.
Rather than PCI express Gen four.
I love how fast this swap is man.
There you go.
I could speed swap SSDs on the PlayStation Five all day.
Here we go ladies and gentlemen.
Did they actually lock it out or
do they just kind of not guarantee that it'll work?
Oh straight up no.
Now I have a feeling that this capacity restriction
is just because there aren't any eight terabyte
PCI express Gen Four drives right now.
And that they would actually lift that
once there is a Gen four eight terabyte drive,
but there you go.
It's as simple as that,
it checks if you're a gen three drive and says no.
Because it knows it's not gonna be fast enough.
That's fine because I have a new idea.
Let's go ahead and try a PCI express Gen four drive,
but an older one
that might not meet Sony's speed recommendations.
This particular drive right here is rated by Coursera
at I think four and a half gigabytes per second write,
And five gigabytes per second read.
It's one of the first gen four drives.
It's a little confusing because I think they still
have an MP 600 in their product lineup,
but now it's like core or pro or something like that.
Whatever we have the OG one,
very curious to see how it treats that.
At least it gives me the option to format this one though.
It really is kind of a bummer that Sony doesn't just
give me the option.
To throw a gen three drive in and you know,
store my video clips on it.
But they don't let you store video clips at all.
I guess the intention is, look, this is a game drive.
That's how we've architected it.
Fair enough.
If you experience problems While playing a game
install an M.2 storage,
try installing it in console storage.
So even though we are really close to the speed
of a good gen three drive,
it's at least allowing me given that it is a gen four drive
to install to this one, huh?
I'm surprised.
I would've thought the purpose of running that benchmark
would be to determine if there's enough performance.
It's also quite possible that Sony is trying to ensure
that they're specking the requirements for the future
not just today.
I mean, they've got clearly a big plan
with respect to how they wanna leverage
the PlayStation Five storage architecture
to enable different gaming experiences.
The fact that we can't see the problem
in a first-generation game,
that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a problem.
So the bottom line then is I'm absolutely stoked.
Open standards like M.2 and competition
are better for consumers,
but that doesn't mean that Sony's approach here was perfect.
For example, Sony specifically says
that not all games are necessarily playable
from the ad-in SSD.
Even if you meet the recommended minimum speed
of 5,500 megabytes per second.
It should be noted that the PlayStation Five's
internal storage can reach 5.5 gigabyte per second Raw
or eight to nine gigabytes per second compressed.
So the question then is
how do we make this easier for consumers?
What I would like to say is that SSD makers
should just internally validate their drives
for the PlayStation Five.
But I think we know how that would turn out.
What should exist is some kind of industry-wide
preferably third-party certification for SSDs.
Like we have with SD cards.
Where there's some agreed upon performance metric
that a drive should have to hit
in order to get a certain designation
class A, class B, et cetera,
but failing that because it's never gonna happen.
Sony should have just certified some drives.
I mean, Mark Cerny did post what drive he bought.
So I guess that's as close as it gets.
But the good thing about a lack of certification
is that it keeps the cost down and in the longterm,
almost any commodity drive off the shelf,
realistically will manage the speed Sony's requiring.
But that's the future.
And that doesn't help gamers today.
And even though the requirements have been laid out for us,
it says 5.5 gigabytes per second at least,
just because of drive says that on the box,
that doesn't actually tell you anything meaningful
about that drives performance characteristics.
Either Sony is admitting
that it doesn't really need to do 5.5 gigabytes per second.
And we saw that today at least
that does appear to be true.
Or they're setting up their users to buy the wrong drive
only to realize eight months down the road
when they've filled it up
and their performance takes a nosedive
that they have to run out and buy something else.
Sony even acknowledges
that there could be performance issues
when running games off of an ad-in drive.
And they say that some drives may be unplayable,
even if it meets their specifications.
So at the end of the day, at least today,
it looks like as long as you go for a
PCI express Gen four drive, you should be okay.
But because Sony hasn't taken the step
to certify add-in storage,
we're not exactly certain
where we're gonna end up in the future.
So my recommendation would be check out
one of the drives that we've got down below,
but don't go all the way in terms of capacity,
maybe get a one terabyte, get what you need today
and then upgrade in the future
once there's a little bit more clarity.
Just like we've got a lot of clarity about
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe check out our initial impressions
where we reviewed the PlayStation Five.
David did a lot of work on that video
and he did a great job.