As you already know, very soon we will be able to expand the PS5 memory with an M.2 SSD, however, Sony left us a series of technical requirements that we had to take into account when buying a unit, since, according to them, not all models on the market would be compatible with the console. But, to what extent is it true?
Putting a “slow” SSD in PS5
According to the technical requirements published by Sony, the SSD units that are going to be connected to the internal socket of a PS5 must have a read speed of at least 5,500 MB / s. This is a figure that can be easily found in the market, even many models exceed it with speeds of 7,000 MB / s, however, the main problem is that to get them you will have to spend a large amount of money to get one of them.
The cheaper options are obviously slower, however, at The Verge they have wanted to clear up doubts and have tested a unit that only promises readings of 3,900 MB / s. What happens if we use this type of SSD? Will your console stop working?
Everything works perfectly
Against all odds, the ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite SSD performed flawlessly. This unit managed to reach reading times of 3,898 MB / s according to the test carried out by the console itself, figures that do not comply with the official Sony standards, but that surprisingly the console seems to accept. Simply, after completing the test, a message will inform you that in case of experiencing problems while playing the game, the solution could be to move the content to the integrated storage system of the console itself.
For testing, the games Ratchet and Clank: A Dimension Apart , Returnal, Spider-Man: Miles Morales , FFVII Remake (PS5 and PS4 versions), and Yakuza Like a Dragon (PS5 and PS4 versions) were installed on The Verge. The tests were focused on checking the loading times of each game, from when the application was started until the main menu was reached, and surprisingly the same results were obtained for the internal memory, a Sabrent Rocket SSD (a model that complies with the 5,500 MB / s required by Sony) and the “low” speed ”ADATA model.
This has shown that at the moment it does not seem to matter that the SSD memory offers more or less speed, since it apparently does not seem to suffer major problems when it comes to reading.
And what happens in the future?
That will be the question that remains in the air. Right now the available games seem to respond perfectly with reading times lower than 3900 MB / s, and as they point out in The Verge, taking into account that Xbox Series X works with speeds of 2.4 GB / s, all the games that are developed for both platforms possibly respect Microsoft‘s bandwidth, and only Sony exclusive titles are what they seek to squeeze the most of the properties of PS5.
In the latter case, if the developers begin to squeeze the 5,500 MB / s of read, it will be then that these slower and cheaper memories suffer problems.
