This summer you will be able to expand the SSD capacity of the PS5, Bloomberg says

The PS5’s 825GB SSD drive doesn’t provide much headroom for many users, but that will change in the summer, when according to Bloomberg Sony will offer an update that will allow access to SSD expansions like those offered by the Xbox X/S Series.

Sony already made it clear that expanding that storage capacity would not be possible for the first few months after launch, but reports suggest that a new firmware release over the summer will enable the console’s M.2 expansion slot that will allow SSDs with similar performance to the console’s standard SSD to be purchased and installed.

More capacity that will make the fans work harder

According to Bloomberg the activation of this feature and the installation of an M.2 SSD in one of these slots will have a collateral effect: that of its impact on cooling.

Thus, starting up that second SSD drive could increase the internally dissipated temperature, which will cause the firmware to also enable the console’s fans to spin at a higher speed to counteract that extra heat dissipation.

Be that as it may, this option is very interesting in an era where several games easily exceed 100 GB of disk space. Although the SSD capacity of the PS5 is 825 GB, the space available to the user is 667 GB right out of the box.

It remains to be seen what type of drives Sony recommends for this expansion and at what price. Microsoft developed expansion cards together with Seagate that were actually just M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSDs with a slightly different packaging. Their price is still high (€221 on Amazon for the 1TB Expansion Card currently), and it wouldn’t be surprising if PS5 drives hover around those prices as well.

Via Bloomberg