Sony Officially Licenses PS5 SSD from Western Digital

Better hope WD's SSD's are better quality than their HDD's. Only brand whose HDD's have died on me, multiple times unfortunately.

A bit pricey just for the luxury of being able to play 30 games at the same time. I think I’ll just continue to delete them when I’ve finished! Never had an issue with hard drive space for this very reason, never anticipate having a problem.

@thefourfoldroot1 you can get the regular one without pre-attached heatsink for a relatively low price. You can attach a heatsink on your own and you are fine to go.

I'm good on space for now, but will pick an SSD up when they get cheaper. Hopefully 1tb under $100 by next year.

Hmmm... the exact same WD_BLACK SN850 1TB SSD including heatsink, minus the PlayStation branding (but still labelled as PS5 Compatible) is currently £124.52 at Amazon.

Bit of a mind at ease development I suppose but I'm surprisingly still good on space at the moment. Probably I'll look out for these come Black Friday.

@Reeneman I paid £77 for 500Gb WD Black SN850 and fitted my own heat sink for £13. Well worth it future proofing the PS5

They should have gone to bed with Firecuda 530. It's faster and it has a stupid looking creature on the front of the box that just needs to disappear.

@Topov81 Yep, bought at that price and installed last week, £60 extra for a logo.

Before it was officially licensed, this was the SSD I chose. I really liked the specs, so it was down between this WD SSD and the Corsair SSD I had in my PC, which I was very happy with. When I learned the Corsair Force MP600 (like in my PC) wouldn't fit in the PS5 because of the giant heatsink, I was back to considering only the WD SSD. His lordship, Mark Cerny, tweeted that was the SSD he chose for his own PS5 and that was the most glowing endorsement possible that cemented my decision to go ahead and buy it. It's good to see the WD SSD now has the coveted official branding. That'll certainly give the SSD a leg up over the competition.

i bought a 2 tb fire cuda for 100$ off on amazon and i'm pretty happy with it so far.
but i have wd's in my pc and they also work pretty well. so if i didn't go with the firecuda i would have bought this one.

I use a sabrent rocket 4 with its ps5 heat shield and its been excellent. With all my ps4 stuff on a 4tb external drive, ive found the extra 1tb of ssd to be enough.
Some people are happier installing officially branded stuff, so this is a great option for them..

People make this sound a lot harder than it is. I got an XPG S70 1TB, and a third-party heat sink, and it's worked awesome - feels slightly faster than the internal, with slightly less pop-in for some games - for less money than WD without the Playstation logo. And copying things TO it is crazy fast - it writes in Gigs per second, something the internal storage simply can't handle.

And for the fanboy conversation, this storage solution is one place where the PS5 beats the XBox. Yes, Microsoft's solution is simpler - there's no choice, buy the one expansion offered from the one vendor offering it, at a price that hasn't dropped since it was released. But Sony's is more consumer-friendly in the end, with costs that are already lower than Microsoft's, and bound to continue to drop in the months and years to come. Other brands may not negotiate the PS logo (and fee that undoubtedly comes with it), but they'll still offer solid solutions at lower price points.

Unless you want to store 10TB of content locally, in which case swapping SSDs in the PS5 is less convenient than doing it on an XBox, but still...

I have all my ps4 games installed on an external hdd and my ps5 games on the ps5's ssd (obviously) and i'm never close to running out of space as i only have a few ps5 games installed at once..i'll never have the time to play all the games i have therefore i'll probably never need to use the expansion port..still nice to have options open to us..

My game time and what I enjoy that's being released have been greatly reduced. I'm going to opt for the 2TB instead of waiting for a 4TB. I'll also be waiting for it to drop in price. With inflation as crazy as it is, upgrading the system's memory has gone from a "must have" to a "nice to have".

What's the point of having 20 or 50 games all installed on your SSD all at the same time. I'd find it impossible to play 20 games within a month never mind 50 games in a month. Having almost a dozen games installed on mine does me just fine and never feel the need to delete a game to make space for another because of mostly completing games then delete before moving onto the next one. Currently have almost 10 games installed with almost 300GB storage remaining. When finally get round to upgrading to plus premium might be wise grabbing an extra SSD but even then I probably won't feel the need too either cause you know complete game then delete game before installing new ones. Maybe in a couple more years from now might change my mind just have no need for it at the mo

@Beerheadgamer82
My thoughts exactly. Apart from a few very specific family usercases, this whole idea baffles me.

@Beerheadgamer82
Thats fine if you are the only one using the system.
My wife also uses the ps5s so I have to ensure there's enough room for all the games she wants as well as the ones im playing or looking at. We dont have kids, but I would imagine space would be under even more pressure if we did! 😁

I just checked - 32 games on console storage, 115 on the hard drive...

I bought the 1TB SN850 a year ago for £125. The deal included a DIY heatsink. It currently has 83GB free. The console currently has 225GB free. I also have two 1TB Samsung T7 SSD's dedicated to PS5 games. GREY 1 has 95GB free and GREY 2 has 225GB free. I also have four 1 TB Samsung T7's dedicated to PS4 games. SILVER has 124GB free. RED has 122GB free. BLACK has 125GB free. BLUE has 96 GB free. My WD 4TB HDD has 2TB free.
All chosen games logged and ready to go.
Damn this OCD...

Great SSD, have had one in my PS5 for a few months but no-one should be paying the crazy prices quoted in this article.

I paid £120 total for my 1TB SN850, including the Sabrent heatsink, which is probably better than whatever one is bundled with this 'deal".

@Titntin a very valid fact I didn't think of. Yh if that was the case for me also I would have grabbed an extra SSD a long time ago

Honestly, I never thought I'd buy an internal SSD, but then I did almost instantly with the PS5, and the quality of life improvements alone are worth it for me. Yes, it's a little costly, but most games on my PS5 are big downloads, with open world games I'm more likely to revisit so won't delete them right away, especially ones that get DLC. And then other games that don't really have stories to complete, like sports and simulation games, online shooters etc, etc are generally huge too.

Having access to my own catalogue and being able to play anything that I want to when I want to, and being able to switch things around without deleting many things has been a great addition to the PS5, for me personally. Especially with going all digital from now on. No disc switching, just load a game up in 5 seconds to play from either SSD.

Whether or not you should buy a licensed one?... No you shouldn't if you want a good price. The "hundreds of hours testing" is fine, but really they just struck a marketing deal to boost sales of the product. If you want products with "hundreds of hours of testing" ask real people, read reviews, they have already done the real life testing for you by using products at home.

I myself used a Gammix on a PS5 and have played God of War relentlessly from it, and it was faster and more responsive if anything than the PS5 SSD. Transfers 100+gig games at around 1-2.5gig a second. Before that, I did just use it as storage to be honest, but I was happy enough to spend for that as I wanted the console to be as next gen as possible. I'd not recommend it as essential, but it's got fair use.

But to others there's only a few questions to ask yourselves. Do I need more space/quality of life? And is it worth the money to me? If yes, look for the best deal and research other people's experiences with the products, and happy gaming 😁

I have had one of the 2TB ones (the WD SN850) since the end of January.

Yes, the external HDD will store PS5 games, but you cannot launch them from there. And the extended SSD is lightning fast.

There are 16 PS5 games all on the SSD, totalling 0.8TB of 2TB.
There are 43 PS4 games on the external WD Elements USB HDD, totalling 1.4TB, out of 6TB

If I was to run out of space on this SSD, I could probably copy a few PS5 on the external HDD, or even onto the internal storage (currently totally empty) in order to make room.

I can only think of half-a-dozen games coming out this year that I will most likely buy, so storage space should not be an issue for quite some time.

@themightyant I can definitely see why many want the extra SSD and I'm not against the idea of getting one either, makes a lot of sense just grabbing one anyway. I Probably play a few different games per month and complete them within that month depending on trophy times per game which requires on average around 150GB of space per month, so realistically all I need per month is around 300GB for games. The installing of new games and their download times has never really been a problem for me, doesn't take me long to start playing a newly installed game. But like you said in number 4 we're all a little different. Might just grab this new SSD anyways next year on some amazon sale or something. Either way it's nice just to have the extra storage anyways even if not always putting it to use all of the times, ease of mind kinda thing

Oooffff, Imagine all the people who weren’t smart enough to wait for something like this to come around

The 1TB SN850 is currently going for £118.98 on amazon which is a decent price. I got one of these and it works a dream.

Bought a 2tb Samsung black (I think) a few months ago.
Got a great price and love I have all my games installed and ready to go wherever I like.
Each to their own but I’ll be doing the same for my Series X when it eventually requires it.

Prices have dropped a good $140 for the 2TB since I bought it 1 year ago👍

@Topov81

It’s like Nintendo-branded SD cards all over again.

Pointless.

@Bismarck Yeah i got the 4tb 530. Pretty pricey but i love it.

what rubbish I ordered one few weeks ago with heatsink cause my ps5 to constantly reboot and repair the harddrive and almost broke. my playstation. I've sent it back to amazon now and still hasn't arrived or gotten money back it's been 2 weeks so told amazon of the issue with return never buying a wd black ever again

Nearly choked when I saw the prices, why bother buying these when you can get an ordinary external drive and swap games in and out?

I'll probably end up doing this. PS isn't my 3rd parties console anymore, so I don't have the massive glut of games I do elsewhere, but there's still enough, and potentially with the addition of Extra in the future, it's going to become even more painful than it already is (looking at you, FF7 remake) to swap around downloads. I still don't want to mess with installing it until PS5's are easily available though, just in case of the unexpected random static electricity at just the wrong moment scenario.

@feral1975 Because the file copy time to and fro a regular drive is far slower than just downloading the game, and the PS5 stupidly doesn't allow that to happen in the background, you have to sit there staring at the progress bar and wait for it.

@NEStalgia
Surely you (not you specifically) can just plan in advance and do something else while that's going on.

@feral1975 The lack of doing it in sleep/background gets in its way. Personally, usually when I have my console on, it's because I have time to play something, and that's when I'm also, there, with it on, and remembering or have the moment to copy something. Even DELETING things makes you just sit there and wait for the progress bar, and that's surprisingly slow. I'm not likely to turn a console on, just to set up a file copy, leave it there for an hour plus, sitting on a progress bar, then come back and play it, only when it's done, or just turn it own to do a file copy overnight like it's Windows 95.

It's especially weird because downloads can happen in the background. But file copies/deletes can't. PS4 was kinda bad with file operations, too, it's a big reason I started with XB as my digital console for third parties while PS4 was still physical. It just handles this kind of stuff a lot more like a PC. TBH I assumed PS5 would naturally fix a lot of this kind of stuff, but so far, nope, they're sticking with the Nintendo-inspired OS, lol.

As a result, I've actually stopped using my external HDD and just stuck to rotating games around and downloading/deleting them on the internal. It's a pain, but it's less of a pain than how external HDs are handled and takes, like 1/10 the time (on a fast internet connection.) My biggest worry is how good or bad the write endurance is on the internal over the long haul. I'd hate to end up with a dead console due to a worn out SSD.

Wheeeellll what do we have here, esteemed ladies and gents of the audience! Something that would have served better, perhaps, if it was to hit the market right at the PS5's launch?
Took them almost 2 years after, but who's counting, right?
I've been saying this since the first news came out that the SSD expansion slot is blocked at launch.... : a contract should have been done between Sony and an SSD manufacturer to produce and to offer a compatible SSD drive as soon as the console hit the market.
And this way offer a viable storage expansion possibility to the clients, AND prevent said expansion slot from being blocked.
But instead, what did we get?
A little lack of vision here.... A little lack of interest there... And 2 years later:
" Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Everybody gather round and give a round of applause to Sony for releasing the first official expansion SSD's for the PS5! "

Meh...

N.B. this is in no way pointed at this article per say, but at some of Sony's departments that have a habit of slacking off, and not giving 2 cents about their own clients needs and/or wishes.

@NEStalgia
Yeah, a remote play install/delete function would be good using the PS app

@Shinnok789 but you at least have a choice of buying off the shelf SSD's for the PS5.

Rather that than the MS route, where you ONLY have the 'offical' SSD and that's your lot.

By the time I get around (for me personally) to justifying the price for that extra space, the PS5 Slim will be out with 2tb of storage space included.

What the heck is the purpose of the blue LED?

@thefourfoldroot1

Indeed, most agreed! Especially that I'm downloading even things like Call of Duty in a couple of minutes (to reach the playable state).

@Milktastrophe
I'm sure the testing sorted it out, but even if not, there are plenty of other brands that easily meet the requirements. Sony stayed true to the console non-proprietary drive they started with the PS3, minus the Vita's proprietary (and overpriced) SD.

@Shinnok789
Sony unlocked the extended storage slot 10 months after launch, not 2 years after. And there are plenty of makes and models to choose from. This article is reporting that Sony has actually endorsed one, but that doesn't change the fact that extensions have been available for almost a year now.

And let's not forget the market value. I can get a 1TB m.2 expansion card for the PS5 for $110. A 1TB proprietary expansion for the Series X costs $220.

Amazon prime day currently have the 1tb at £99.74 2tb £177.99

Now that there is an OFFICIAL SSD, Sony could include a means to update the drive's firmware???

@thefourfoldroot1 yea listen, I got a 2tb sabrent and the backlog on my machine is becoming insane

@SystemAddict
Ok, cool. But you know that you don’t need to have your backlog on your machine right? I don’t mean to sound condescending, maybe you have a technical reason, but you can just have the next 5 or 10 or even 20+ (Depending on size) games you want to play on there instead of buying new hard drives(?)

@thefourfoldroot1 this is what I’m saying dude I can’t focus on one title at a time. Which can hinder particular interest in of any of them ever further from it in fact, 5 10 20, 40+ you name it these will be on my SSD for a very long time.

@SystemAddict
That’s interesting. I couldn’t imagine that myself. I’m playing Tales of Arise at the moment and, whilst I might be able to jump into another non story based game now and again (such as maybe GT7 or something) if I tried to play multiple other games, especially story based, I’d completely forget what was going on in Arise. Maybe your memory is significantly better than mine, or perhaps you don’t play games with a narrative, but for me, playing so many games at once would ruin my enjoyment of most of them.

@thefourfoldroot1 yea it’s not working out for me. Fact is I have 2.5tb of storage or whatever, that’s not nearly full yet here I am getting overwhelmed because I wanted a full dashboard! 🥴 might look into pushing titles down into the excess library with some apps I don’t need.

@lacerz I don't know what you've read, but it's very clear from my comment, i wasn't referring to the date of unlocking the slot, but the date of launching a licensed SSD.
Something Sony should have offered at console's launch, instead of blocking the slot.
And one of the reasons mentioned for the block being the lack of compatible SSD models. Situation that could have been prevented if Sony was to make said contract before launch and release said licensed SSD along with the console.
Clear(er) now?
I am not disputing they unlocked the slot after 7 months, or that compatible SSD appeared on the market after they unlocked it.
And I'm not discussing prices.
Only that Sony could have prevented the slot from being locked in the first place for as long as it was, by insuring that this release of a licensed drive happened at PS5's launch, and not 2 years after.

To be fair, the SN850 is a great SSD. I've got the 2TB myself and got it on sale for a good price.

@NEStalgia
I've honestly no problems if I don't overload the drives and delete and move regularly.
But then I jump between consoles, shows playing the the TV on a PC and various musical instruments as I'm easily distracted, but I'm never left without something to do in the meantime.😁