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 are a little number of third-party options now available for gamers, though curiously none from Sony itself. which may still be coming, except for now, the closest you’ll get is that the Nextorage PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD, with a powerful performance that the majority won’t be ready to get their hands on anyway.
Nextorage may be a brand related to Sony, either because of the latter’s subsidiary or joint owner. However, despite that link and, therefore, the SSD’s specs, it’s curious that neither company has jumped on the chance to plug the SSD because of the first-party storage expansion for the PS5. That’s especially puzzling, considering it’d be the sole one thus far that stands up to Sony’s 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 features a cache of 2GB DDR4 SDRAM and boasts a better sequential write speed of 6,900 MB/s and a random read speed of 1,000,000 IOPS.
Those numbers already put it before other third-party PS5 SSDs, but its design cements its image as a political solution. Additionally to having a conductor to satisfy Sony’s requirements, it seems that the SSD module is designed to suit 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 get outside of Japan. Even then, the 36,444 JPY ($330) tag for the 1TB SSD is considerably above the same WD Black SN850. Hopefully, Sony will soon launch a worldwide PS5 SSD that bears its brand to satisfy gamers who wouldn’t want anything but what Sony has blessed.
