upgrading the PS5 looks messy strong
disagree here Microsoft's approach for now limits consumer Choice costs more
sacrifices performance and okay yeah it is a lot easier it
really does take like 2 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 they're documentation could
probably be better but the actual process of upgrading the storage of the
PlayStation 5 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
whatever the first key ad advantage of Sony's PS5 storage system is also its
greatest weakness Choice thanks to its
industry standard m.2 22110 slot the PS5
can physically accept most ssds on the
market everything from the most mundane consumer drive to Exotic data center
drives with opan 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 new egg 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 5500 megabytes per second or
greater are officially supported so that immediately disqualifies any SATA m.2
drives as well as PCI Express gen 3
drives since PC C Express Gen 4 is required to hit speeds anywhere from
3500 megab 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 long term competition will put pressure on SSD
makers to provide solutions that will meet the ps5s performance standards at a
fair price now Microsoft has had the upper hand thus far Sony is only just
now Bing this upgrade program well
Microsoft's co-branded Seagate storage expansion card has been available pretty
much since day one for Xbox with big game libraries but the ball is now in
Sony's Court cuz $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 well their internal storage is soldered so if it dies you're so
unless you want to 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 4 terab but the thing is even if I'm
not allowed to put my whopping ,000 8
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 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 Philip
screwdriver and of course your PlayStation 5 start by laying it down on
its side lifting this corner here and
sliding towards the base where it stands wh 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 regrettably that's not magnetic
you want to 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 mm wide and 80 mm long so
we're going to put this into the 80
there 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 should be fine I'm beta
as if your drive has a large cooler that prevents it from fitting in the
PlayStation 5'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 you know
random thought what would prevent you from just installing the SSD with its
big chungus heat sink on it and leaving this Shield off anyway Let's uh let's
fire it up with our Beta key redeemed we 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 are 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 want to 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 want to
install that many games but I want to 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 Cuda oh yeah that wow that
was really fast I was just going to peek at this cuz seate told us it was
specifically made with the PlayStation 5 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 6500 megabytes a second console storeage
installation location PS5 games and apps m.2 storage just like that let's install
a game shall we obviously we want the PS5 version this will take a minute well
um this is it I've thought maybe it would show me where it's installed but
no 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
discernable pop in or anything like that
there's enough Distortion from the like
uh 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 deta oh
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 going to 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 all right so
everything is totally Perfect come on third
page 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 going to 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 8 TB SSD and it is
PCI Express gen 3 rather than PCI
Express Gen 4 I love how fast this swap
is man there you go I could speed swap
ssds on the PlayStation 5 all
day here we go ladies and gentlemen do
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 8 tbte
PCI Express Gen 4 drives right now and that they would actually lift that once
there is a Gen 4 8 TB drive but there
you go it's a simple as that it checks if you're a gen 3 drive and says no cuz
it knows it's not going to be fast enough that's fine cuz I have a new idea
let's go ahead and try a PCI Express Gen 4 drive but an older one that might not
meet Sony's speed
recommendations this partic this particular drive right here is rated by
Corsair at I think 4 and2 gabyt per second right and 5 GB per second reads
it's one of the first gen 4 drives it's a little confusing because I think they
still have an mp600 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 okay 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 3 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 that's how we've architected it and like all right fair enough okay if you
experience problems while playing a game install the m.2 storage try installing
it in console storage so even though we
are really close to the speed of a good
gen 3 drive it's at least allowing me
given that it is a Gen 4 drive to install to this one huh I'm surprised I
would have thought the purpose of running that Benchmark would be to Det
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 want to
leverage the PlayStation 5 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 addin SSD even if you meet the recommended minimum speed of 5,500
megabytes per second it should be noted that the PlayStation 5's internal
storage can reach 5.5 GB pers second raw or 8 to 9 GB 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 5 but I think we know how
that would turn out what should exist is some kind of industrywide 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
Etc but failing that cuz it's never
going to happen Sony should have just certified some drives I mean Mark Cy 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
long term 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 GB
per second at least just because a drive says that on the box that that doesn't
actually tell you anything meaningful about that drive's performance
characteristics so either Sony is admitting that it doesn't really need to
do 5.5 GB 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 8
months down the road when they filled it up and their performance takes a nose
dive 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 addin 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 4 drive you should be okay
but because Sony hasn't taken the step to certify addin storage we're not
exactly certain where we're going to 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 in terms of capacity maybe get a one tab get what you need
today and then upgrade in the future once there's a little bit more clarity
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if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out our initial Impressions where we reviewed the PlayStation 5 David did
a lot of work on that video and he did a great job