The PlayStation 5’s zippy built-in solid-state drive has only so much room for games. Put a higher-capacity M.2 SSD in the console’s free slot with one of our favorite upgrade drives.
One compelling feature of the Sony PlayStation 5 is its M.2 slot, which accommodates a second internal solid-state drive to supplement the gaming console’s standard SSD. Not just any SSD will do, however—you need a drive that meets Sony’s exacting standards for interface, thickness, speed, and more. Fortunately, many of today’s PCI Express 4.0 NVMe SSDs qualify as PS5-compatible, even some that aren’t expressly marketed as such. Installing the secondary stick may take a bit of work, but it will let you keep a much larger game library on hand. Here’s what you need to know. How Much Storage Can I Add to My PS5? The PlayStation 5’s built-in SSD has a capacity of 825GB, of which 667GB is free out of the box. Generally, you should be able to fit nine or 10 AAA games on the drive—today’s titles on average take 50GB to 60GB of storage, although some are considerably larger. For example, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War takes the franchise’s trend toward ballooning file sizes to a new high by filling nearly 220GB, so your available space may be gone sooner than you’d think. Fortunately, the PS5 supports secondary drives with capacities ranging from 250GB to a whopping 4TB. In selecting the drives featured in this roundup, the main requirement—other than proving their overall mettle as solid gaming SSDs in our benchmarking—was that they meet Sony’s official criteria (listed above) for use with a PS5. Most but not all of our choices are marketed by their manufacturers as PS5-friendly. One that isn’t, the Samsung SSD 980 Pro, was launched before the PS5 was available, but it easily meets Sony’s compatibility specs. Samsung SSD 980 Pro On the other hand, there are a number of M.2 solid-state drives—some touted as PS5-compatible—that fall short in one requirement: their rated data transfer speed or throughput is short of the recommended 5,500MBps.
