Mark Cerny, lead architect for the PS5, presented new information about the next-gen console. But it’s a presentation geared for developers, going into the nitty-gritty technical bits of the console- but no showcase of games, or the console itself yet.
But there is still interesting new information from the presentation. One of them is how large the “custom” SSD is.
Cerny revealed that the built-in SSD size is 825GB. It’s a non-conventional size number- storage sizes are usually usually 128GB, 256GB, 512GB or 1TB.
The number comes from the custom component of this SSD- a custom flash controller that uses 12-channel interface, giving it a bandwidth of 5.5GB/s. Commercially available SSDs right now comes in 8, or rarely 10, channels the most, with at most a 3.5GB/s bandwidth via PCIe 3.0.
That 5.5GB/s bandwidth will make the PS5 loads 100 times faster than a PS4, achieving the promise of no load times and super-fast streaming (no textures popping up late)- in theory at least.
“With a 12-channel interface, the most natural size for an SSD is 825GB,” Cerny explained.
But that was not the end of the argument. Adding more storage size is costly as SSDs are not cheap, Cerny added in the presentation. But the PS5 team has done various testings on how players use their storage sizes.
“Ultimately we resolve this question by looking at play patterns of a broad range of gamers,” Cerny said. “We examined the specific games that they were playing over the course of the weekend or week or month. And whether that set of games would fit properly on the SSD.
“We were able to establish that the friction caused by the reinstalls, or re-downloads, would be quite low. So we locked in on that 825GB size.”
The PS5 will also allow you to expand its storage. But unlike the Xbox Series X which is going for the memory-card style proprietary expansion SSD, the PS5 can support ready-to-buy SSDs. Albeit not the SSDs we can buy or already own right now.
“We will be supporting certain M.2 SSDs,” Cerny said. “These are internal drives that you can get on the open market and install in a bay in the Playstation 5.”
These certain M.2 SSDs are the ones using PCIe 4.0, which can have a bandwidth of 7.0GB/s. But the team at Sony has to do compatibility tests first to see if these SSDs from store shelves can work with the PS5’s custom SSD- or even fit the expansion bay of the yet-to-be-revealed PS5.
So don’t go buy an SSD yet if you plan to have one ready for PS5. But expect to see a list of compatible SSD list for the PS5 after the console launch.
However, current conventional external hard drives can still be connected to store and play PS4 games, which the PS5 is backwards compatible with.
The PS5 is still set for a release later this year.