Sony launched the PlayStation 5 console in November last year and despite the scarce availability, the company has sold 10 million PS5 units globally. One notable omission in the console so far was the ability to expand the storage to play PS5 games. And well, the feature is finally live for beta testers running the latest update.
Expand PlayStation 5 Storage
If you are one of those 10 million customers and don’t mind running beta software, you can expand the storage of your PS5 to play resource-intensive games right now. However, you will need PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 NVMe SSDs that offer 5,500MB/s or faster read speed to expand PS5 storage. M.2 SSDs with the type numbers 2230, 2242, 2260, 2280, and 22110 are supported. You can expand the storage anywhere ranging from 250GB to 4TB.
Sony points out that not all games will be playable with the same performance you’d expect from the internal SSD. This is even if you use an M.2 SSD with 5,500MB/s read speed. “Not all games are necessarily playable with the exact same performance provided by the PS5 console’s internal Ultra-High Speed SSD, even where the M.2 SSD device’s sequential read speed is faster than 5500MB/s,” wrote Sony in its support post.
Sony also warns that using M.2 SSD requires cooling. “Using an M.2 SSD with your PS5 console requires effective heat dissipation with a cooling structure, such as a heatsink. You can attach one to your M.2 SSD yourself, either in a single-sided format, or double-sided format. There are also M.2 SSDs that have cooling structures (such as heatsinks) built in,” the company added.
If you are interested, you can sign up for PlayStation 5 beta program. Once you have done that, check the instructions to safely install and remove the SSD from Sony’s support page.
