- [Narrator] Upgrading
the PS5 looks messy. - Strong disagree here. Microsoft's approach for
now limits consumer choice, costs more, sacrifices performance, and . It is a lot easier. It really does take like two seconds. But I think that assuming that
it needs to be that simple is not giving gamers enough credit and that's something Sony did well. Sure their documentation
could probably be better. But the actual process
of upgrading the storage of the PlayStation Five
is not that overwhelming. Once you're familiar with
a few simple principles. And once we've walked you through it, you will be ready to upgrade the SSD, whether it's your game console, PC, car, microwave or whatever. And you'll be ready to
go check out our sponsor. Thanks to Honey for sponsoring this video, honey is the free to use shopping tool that helps search for the best promo codes on tons of your favorite sites. Get it today at joinhoney.com/LTT. (upbeat music) The first key advantage of
Sony's PS 5 storage system is also its greatest weakness, choice. Thanks to its industry
standard M.2 22110 slot. The PS 5 can physically accept
most SSDs on the market. Everything from the most
mundane consumer drive to exotic data center drives
with Optane memory on them, at least physically. In a very PC like turn of events. Sony's compatibility messaging has gotten somewhat complicated and the thing is, while any of these drives might fit. You can't just go to Newegg
or Amazon punch in M.2 SSD order the cheapest thing
and expect it to work. Only drives rated for
a sustained read speed of 5,500 megabytes per second or greater are officially supported. So that immediately
disqualifies any SATA M.2 drives as well as PCI express Gen three drives. Since PCI express Gen four
is required to hit speeds anywhere from 3,500 megabytes per second, all the way up to 7,000
megabytes per second. Single and double-sided drives
are both supported though. And all of this is great
news for consumer choice because in the longterm
competition will put pressure on SSD makers to provide
solutions that will meet the PS 5's performance
standards at a fair price. Now Microsoft has had
the upper hand thus far, Sony is only just now
betaing this upgrade program. Well, Microsoft co-branded
Seagate storage expansion card has been available
pretty much since day one for X-Box with big game libraries. But the ball is now in Sony's court. 'Cause $220 is already today stupidly high for a
wimpy two lane NVMe SSD. When I can get a top of the line, Samsung 980 Pro for $20 less. And the situation is only
going to keep getting worse. If nothing puts pressure on Seagate. Although to Microsoft's
credit their boot storage. So the drive installed inside the Xbox is in the form of an M.2 SSD that can be easily replaced
if for whatever reason it needed to be serviced Sony on the other hand while their internal storage is soldered. So if it dies you're SOL, unless you wanna completely
replace the main board. And additionally, you can't quite put in
just anything you want. Your SSD has to be between
250 gigs and four terabytes. But the thing is, even if I'm not allowed to put
my whopping thousand dollar eight terabyte SSD today, theoretically nothing would
prevent me from installing it in the future as more
options become available. So overall Sony's approach is
a huge win for consumer choice and don't believe anyone
who has it tells you that it's too hard or too scary. It's actually really easy. All you'll need is your SSD of choice, a number one Phillips screwdriver. And of course your PlayStation five. Start by laying it down on its side, lifting this corner here
and sliding towards the base where it stands. Whoop, it actually comes off that easily. Simply loosen this screw right here. Try not to lose it. Loosen this second screw. Then you see this little ring right here. Oh, regrettably that's not magnetic. You wanna put this on the
little hole that corresponds to the length of your SSD in our case, this is a 2280 SSD. That means it's 22 millimeters
wide and 80 millimeters long. So we're gonna put this into the 80. There here we go. Then we just take our SSD
and slot it in at the back. A little something like this. So you can go in at an
angle till it clicks, then push it down. Then we screw in that second screw, put the heat shield back in place, reattach the first screw and put the side panel back on. It really is that easy, and
it only takes that long. Other than that for now you have to apply for the beta program in
order to participate. It should be fine I'm beta as (beep). If your drive has a large cooler that prevents it from fitting in the PlayStation Five's SSD bay, you can remove it, but you should check
with your manufacturer to ensure that it will still
be able to operate safely. Random thought, what would
prevent you from just installing the SSD with its
Big Chungus is heatsink on it and leaving this shield off. Anyway, let's fire it up. With our beta key redeemed. We've restarted the PS5 opened up the system menu
and changed the settings to beta software now like
with any beta program Sony warns us that may be incomplete or contain bugs and
they're not responsible for any lost data or damaged hardware. Then we fire the thing up and this is it. You don't even make it to the home screen. You will immediately have to choose, Hey, do you wanna format this M.2 SSD or do you want to not format
and turn the machine off. Obviously I want to format it. Now this is interesting. Data screenshots and video
clips cannot be saved to M.2 storage. So if you were thinking, wow, I don't actually wanna
install that many games, but I wanna save a ton
of gameplay video clips and just use the M.2 for that, you cannot. Let's see how long this takes it. Shouldn't take very long, pretty
toasty storage, fire Kuda. Oh yeah, that was really fast. I was just going to peak at
this 'cause Seagate told us it was specifically made with
the PlayStation Five in mind, but I don't see any PlayStation
branding anywhere on it, which kind of makes sense. And we'll talk about that
a little bit more later. 6,500 megabytes a second installation location, PS5
games and apps M.2 storage just like that. Let's install again shall we. Obviously want the PS 5 version? This will take a minute. Well, this is it. I just thought maybe it
would just show me where it's installed, but Nope,
it's completely transparent. Well, if there was any doubt that we can move around seamlessly in a large open world environment,
we can put that to rest. Haven't seen a single stutter, no discernible poppin
or anything like that. There's enough distortion
from the like film grain, the kind of lens distortion
that they do around the edges of the frame
and stuff like that, that you'd be able to mask a lot of it. Wow that is very cool. And very detail, they're all the same. This is such an unintuitive selector prioritize image quality
or prioritize resolution. Choose whether to prioritize
visual quality or frame rate. That's not what resolution means. I think resolution means frame rate, but I mean a game like this, they're gonna be loading
the whole map anyway. So I wouldn't expect there
to be any difference, but as expected it works fine. Oh no. That's what happens when I don't
have other cars to help me. Oh, they all passed me. I think there's a lot
of assists on right now. This is like the tutorial. So everything is totally perfect. Come on, third pick. Yes. Of course all of this is as we expected, why would Sony roll out this beta? If they didn't have a pretty good idea that it was gonna perform as it should. But what happens if you do not
follow Sony's instructions. To find out, we have prepared
a couple of other SSDs to try including this one right here, which violates a couple
of Sony's guidelines. This is an eight terabyte SSD and it is PCI express Gen three. Rather than PCI express Gen four. I love how fast this swap is man. There you go. I could speed swap SSDs on
the PlayStation Five all day. Here we go ladies and gentlemen. Did they actually lock it out or do they just kind of not
guarantee that it'll work? Oh straight up no. Now I have a feeling that
this capacity restriction is just because there
aren't any eight terabyte PCI express Gen Four drives right now. And that they would actually lift that once there is a Gen four
eight terabyte drive, but there you go. It's as simple as that, it checks if you're a gen
three drive and says no. Because it knows it's
not gonna be fast enough. That's fine because I have a new idea. Let's go ahead and try a
PCI express Gen four drive, but an older one that might not meet Sony's
speed recommendations. This particular drive right
here is rated by Coursera at I think four and a half
gigabytes per second write, And five gigabytes per second read. It's one of the first gen four drives. It's a little confusing
because I think they still have an MP 600 in their product lineup, but now it's like core or
pro or something like that. Whatever we have the OG one, very curious to see how it treats that. At least it gives me the option
to format this one though. It really is kind of a
bummer that Sony doesn't just give me the option. To throw a gen three
drive in and you know, store my video clips on it. But they don't let you
store video clips at all. I guess the intention is,
look, this is a game drive. That's how we've architected it. Fair enough. If you experience problems
While playing a game install an M.2 storage, try installing it in console storage. So even though we are
really close to the speed of a good gen three drive, it's at least allowing me given
that it is a gen four drive to install to this one, huh? I'm surprised. I would've thought the purpose
of running that benchmark would be to determine if
there's enough performance. It's also quite possible
that Sony is trying to ensure that they're specking the
requirements for the future not just today. I mean, they've got clearly a big plan with respect to how they wanna leverage the PlayStation Five storage architecture to enable different gaming experiences. The fact that we can't see the problem in a first-generation game, that doesn't necessarily
mean that there's a problem. So the bottom line then
is I'm absolutely stoked. Open standards like M.2 and competition are better for consumers, but that doesn't mean that
Sony's approach here was perfect. For example, Sony specifically says that not all games are
necessarily playable from the ad-in SSD. Even if you meet the
recommended minimum speed of 5,500 megabytes per second. It should be noted that
the PlayStation Five's internal storage can reach
5.5 gigabyte per second Raw or eight to nine gigabytes
per second compressed. So the question then is how do we make this easier for consumers? What I would like to
say is that SSD makers should just internally
validate their drives for the PlayStation Five. But I think we know how
that would turn out. What should exist is some
kind of industry-wide preferably third-party
certification for SSDs. Like we have with SD cards. Where there's some agreed
upon performance metric that a drive should have to hit in order to get a certain designation class A, class B, et cetera, but failing that because
it's never gonna happen. Sony should have just
certified some drives. I mean, Mark Cerny did
post what drive he bought. So I guess that's as close as it gets. But the good thing about
a lack of certification is that it keeps the cost
down and in the longterm, almost any commodity drive off the shelf, realistically will manage
the speed Sony's requiring. But that's the future. And that doesn't help gamers today. And even though the requirements
have been laid out for us, it says 5.5 gigabytes per second at least, just because of drive
says that on the box, that doesn't actually tell
you anything meaningful about that drives
performance characteristics. Either Sony is admitting that it doesn't really need to
do 5.5 gigabytes per second. And we saw that today at least that does appear to be true. Or they're setting up their
users to buy the wrong drive only to realize eight months down the road when they've filled it up and their performance takes a nosedive that they have to run out
and buy something else. Sony even acknowledges that there could be performance issues when running games off of an ad-in drive. And they say that some
drives may be unplayable, even if it meets their specifications. So at the end of the day, at least today, it looks like as long as you go for a PCI express Gen four
drive, you should be okay. But because Sony hasn't taken the step to certify add-in storage, we're not exactly certain where we're gonna end up in the future. So my recommendation would be check out one of the drives that
we've got down below, but don't go all the way
in terms of capacity, maybe get a one terabyte,
get what you need today and then upgrade in the future once there's a little bit more clarity. Just like we've got a lot of clarity about who our sponsor is. Thanks to Manscaped for
sponsoring this video. Manscaped provides an
all-in-one men's grooming kit that has you covered from head to toe. Their performance package 4.0 includes all the right tools
for whatever the job is. It features their awesome Lawnmower 4.0 Waterproof Body Trimmer. Their Weed Whacker ear and nose trimmer, plus a whole lot of other goodies. And for a limited time, you get all of this plus two free gifts. The Shed travel bag and a pair of Manscaped
anti-chafing boxer briefs. So don't wait visit manscaped.com/TECH or click the link down below
for 20% off and free shipping. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out our initial impressions where we reviewed the PlayStation Five. David did a lot of work on that video and he did a great job.
TL;DW any PCIe gen 4 NVMe drive between 250GB and 4 TB will work. Sony has a drive speed recommendation, but you can still use the drive without meeting the min spec. Linus tested an 8TB gen 3 drive and it gave an error, although I don’t think he tried a 128GB gen 4 drive (8TB gen 4 drives don’t exist yet)