The speed of the storage on the next-gen consoles has been the primary focus for much of the runup to the PS5 and Xbox Series X release. However, recently we've been a little more concerned about the size of those SSDs relative to the storage needs of the games.
Fortunately, both consoles offer the ability to expand your storage while still enjoying those incredible speeds and thanks to a leaked Walmart listing by @GamesAndWario we now have an idea of how much that will cost PS5 owners that need a bit more space (Tom's Guide).
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The alleged Walmart listing is for a "PS5 500GB SSD DRIVE" and is priced at $115. That's actually roughly on par, on a per GB basis, with the 1TB Xbox Series X expansion drives for $219.
While that's pricier than your average M.2 NVMe SSD, given the high performance of these PS5 compatible drives it isn't shocking. Presumably, we can expect to see 1TB versions available for right around that same $220 price point eventually.
As we saw in the PS5 teardown video, the 825GB internal SSD is soldered to the motherboard and non-replaceable. However, adding additional storage that matches the performance of the internal drive isn't too difficult. You just remove the external plastic casing, unscrew the metal plate covering the SSD slot and plug it in.
While it's nowhere near as simple as the Xbox Series X external plug-and-play solution, it's not something you should expect to be doing regularly, so I wouldn't consider it to be too much of a problem.
We'll certainly know more once we start actually installing some next-gen games and seeing what the space issues are like. However, I think most that will run into this as a problem are going to want to hold off for a 1TB solution. That will allow you to really future-proof yourself. Regardless, we're glad to see there likely isn't going to be a massive markup on these drives as this could have been a real pain point for PS5 owners.
