PlayStation 5 Lead Designer Mark Cerny Reveals His NVMe SSD of Choice

[Tsing]

Image: Sony



Cerny Games president and frequent Sony Interactive Entertainment collaborator Mark Cerny is well known to many PlayStation fans for his efforts in helping shape various generations of PlayStation consoles as lead designer.



Following the anticipation that has brewing over the last few days of the PS5’s SSD expansion slot finally being unlocked as part of a beta software update alongside various manufacturers advertising their compatible wares, Cerny today revealed his NVMe SSD of choice by confirming that he has purchased not one, but two of Western Digital’s WD_BLACK SN850 drives to bolster the capacity of his next-gen games console.



While Cerny didn’t indicate what size he purchased in his initial tweet, PS5 owners who opt for Western Digital’s WD_BLACK SN850 drive can expect sequential read performance of up to 7,000 MB/s and sequential write performance of...

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[Burticus]

It just seems strange to spend more on the storage expansion than the console costs.... but hey what do I know

 

[Brian_B]

At least you can buy the SSDs..

or well, before this announcement, you could. That may change.

 

[Endgame]

Is the WD black actually better than a Samsung 980 pro?

 

[Burticus]

Plot thickens!

The PS5 worked fine with the slowest compatible SSD we could find

Is Sony throttling performance?

www.theverge.com

They intentionally used a "cheap" SSD, the XPG Gammix s50 ($129 for 1tb on amz) and the results are interesting. Game load times were the same or almost the same as the internal. Also they noted that the internal has some type of throttle on write speed, as the XPG was much faster copying games to the SSD.

But this gives me hope as $100/TB is definitely better than $200+/TB. I'm thinking like Samsung 980 EVO or such ($109 on amz)

 

[Brian_B]

Honestly, I don't think PS5 cares too much about write speeds.

 

[Burticus]

Honestly, I don't think PS5 cares too much about write speeds.

Sure not during gameplay. But very noticeable when copying huge PS4 games from external hard drive.

 

[Brian_B]

Sure not during gameplay. But very noticeable when copying huge PS4 games from external hard drive.

Yeah but that doesn't exactly impact your experience while playing games, and your still going to be greatly limited by the external drive and USB interface.