The PS5 will be able to take PCIe 4 M.2 NVMe SSDs as expanded storage, provided they are small enough to fit in the dedicated slot. Western Digital (WD) has announced that it has just the drives for it, in the form of the SN850 SSDs.
In terms of numbers, the WD SN850 is capable of read speeds of up to 7GB/s and write speeds of 4.1GB/s. This makes it faster than the custom SSD in the PS5, which reads at 5.5GB/s. And since expanded storage for the console needs to be as fast as the one built-in, this makes it a prime candidate.
Of course, this technically isn’t the first drive that can be compatible with the PS5. We saw an entry from Samsung late last month in the form of the 980 Pro. But the WD SN850 has one possible advantage, in that it has variants that come with a heatsink. And of course, the heatsink comes with the obligatory RGB lighting.
The WD SN850 comes capacities of 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. And they are priced at US$149.99 (~RM622), US$229.99 (~RM954) and US$449.99 (~RM1867), respectively. Heatsink variants come with a US$20 premium on top, across the board. That being said, there’s no mention of when they will be available on our shores just yet.
(Source: WD)
