After much back and forth between Social Media warriors and little to no confirmation coming from Sony, we finally have something to go on. Ok, it’s still a leak, but a decidedly credible one. So let’s take this information with the usual grain of salt. While the PS5 does ship with an 825GB SSD, according to a screenshot and videos shared by user Okami13, we are only going to see roughly 650GB of that space.
In case you needed any more confirmation – the #PS5 review kits have 667 GB of storage.
— Kami (@Okami13_) November 3, 2020
Looks like that's with Astro's Playroom installed.https://t.co/jccCoosOkm pic.twitter.com/XgwfmiWThy
This puts the PS5’s storage space at an estimated 152GB below the Series X’s available 802GB. That’s a whole Call of Duty install (pre-update!) right there. It’s not necessarily a deal breaker or ‘game changing’ revelation, but it’s another notch in the belt of specific details that Sony has remained mum on, especially so close to launch. The upside is that Sony is giving its customers the option to use off-the-shelf NVMe SSDs to expand PS5 storage. These SSDs will need to be approved by Sony beforehand, and-as expected-there is still no official list of compatible drives.
This is in stark contrast to Microsoft’s partnership with Seagate to produce their plug n’ play, 1TB portable SSD. Both companies have taken very different approaches to their storage solutions and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the long term. It is worth noting that Microsoft has confirmed that we will see more 3rd-party solutions for external storage in the future. The Series X|S are only 5 DAYS away from launch with the PS5 tagging along soon after in 7. Whichever you plan to go with first, it’s going to be an interesting and exciting New Generation!