PlayStation 5 SSD From Nextorage Is Fast And Out Of Reach
A few days ago, Sony finally opened the doors for PlayStation 5 owners to expand their internal storage with aftermarket M.2 SSDs. Given the beta-testing period that started in July, there have been a small number of third-party options now available for gamers, though curiously none from Sony itself. That might still be coming, but for now, the closest you can get is the Nextorage PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD, with an impressive performance that most won't be able to get their hands on anyway.
Nextorage is a brand associated with Sony, either as the latter's subsidiary or joint owner. Despite that link and the SSD's specs, it's curious that neither company has jumped on the opportunity to market the SSD as the first-party storage expansion for the PS5. That's especially puzzling, considering it might be the only one so far that truly stands up to Sony's own standards.
The Nextorage PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD comes in 1TB and 2TB versions with slightly different performance benchmarks. The 1TB SSD, which has 1GB of DDR4 SDRAM for cache, advertises 7,300 and 6,000 MB/s speeds for sequential read and write, respectively, while it goes only up to 750,000 IOPS for random reads. The 2TB model has a cache of 2GB DDR4 SDRAM and boasts a higher sequential write speed of 6,900 MB/s and a random read speed of 1,000,000 IOPS.
Those numbers already put it ahead of other third-party PS5 SSDs, but its design cements its image as an official solution. In addition to having a heat sink to meet Sony's requirements, it seems that the SSD module is really designed to fit perfectly into the PlayStation 5's M.2 slot.
As impressive as those specs may sound, the Nextorage PS5 M.2 NVMe SSD will almost be impossible to purchase outside of Japan. Even then, the 36,444 JPY ($330) price tag for the 1TB SSD is considerably higher than an equivalent WD Black SN850. Hopefully, Sony will soon launch a global PS5 SSD that bears its brand to satisfy gamers who wouldn't want anything less than what Sony has blessed.