After almost a year and three months of the PlayStation 5 being on sale, now is the right time to buy a PS5 SSD if you’re running low on storage space.
Today, you can find some of the best PS5 SSDs available for just $150 / £150, with drives like the WD Black SN850 frequently on sale for its lowest-ever price in the UK. In the US, GameStop Pro members can get the Samsung 980 Pro 1TB with a heatsink pre-installed for just $189.99, which is a great deal on a new drive that was only announced a few months ago.
While some might scoff at paying over a hundred bucks for more storage space, the new prices are a notable drop from the previous $290 / £220 tags that we’ve been used to seeing. These deals are superior to what we saw during Black Friday 2021, too, where the discounts weren’t enough to make any drive worthy of an impulse buy.
Go bigger
If 1TB isn’t enough space, higher capacity 2TB drives have also received more generous discounts recently, with the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB now just £269.95 in the UK, which is significantly cheaper than the eye-watering price of £444 (or around $592) that we saw back in December 2020.
That’s still not exactly affordable, mind you, but it’s significantly better value than a mere 12 months ago, which shows that SSD prices are dropping at a steady rate. However, this trend might not continue as "material contamination" has affected some NAND flash production lines, which could result in a price spike of 5 to 10%.
If you really want to get the most value for your money before that happens, though, there are further savings to be had if you’re comfortable installing a heatsink yourself – which is a requirement if you want to use an NVMe SSD on PS5.
However, I’d personally recommend the majority of people grab an SSD that has a heatsink pre-installed. Not only does it make installing a new drive a far less intimidating prospect, but you don’t have to worry about finding a heatsink that meets the exact dimensions as outlined by Sony (this one will do the job, however).
A prudent move
Time has shown that Sony’s decision to allow users to buy off-the-shelf NVMe SSDs was a shrewd one. While it was certainly frustrating that we couldn’t expand the PS5’s storage at launch – and I still think making someone remove the PS5 covers and grab a screwdriver isn’t very user-friendly – it turns out the 10-month long wait for Sony to activate the PS5’s internal SSD drive may have been a good thing in hindsight.
The fact that Sony didn’t go with a proprietary storage drive like Microsoft has with the Seagate 1TB Storage Expansion Card means consumers are now reaping the benefits when it comes to pricing. There’s a large choice of drives and capacities to choose from, and retailers are competing against each other to offer the best deals. Subsequently, it means that the majority of NVMe drives are now noticeably cheaper than Microsoft’s storage solution. You also have some added extra flexibility as these SSD drives will work on PC.
In comparison, the cheapest I’ve ever seen the Xbox Series X/S Seagate 1TB Storage Expansion Card drop to in the UK has been £179.99, which is still more expensive than equivalent NVMe SSDs that work with PS5. You’re also limited to either 500GB or 1TB of storage on Xbox Series X/S, while PS5 users can install a 4TB SSD if they really want to.
That's not to say that Microsoft's decision to go with a proprietary storage drive was wrong, necessarily. The plug-in-and-play nature of the device is truly excellent, and being able to use the SSD on multiple consoles or take it to a friend's house is a really appealing selling point. The fact the 1TB version of the drive was available at launch was also welcome, but it's clear that Microsoft needs to make it more affordable now or offer more alternatives.
Making use of the space
There's also an argument to be made that storage space goes further on PS5 than on Xbox Series X. Even though the PS5 only comes with 667GB of usable storage space compared to 802GB on Xbox Series X, Sony continues to put its Kraken compression tech to good use to shrink games down to more palatable sizes, which ultimately stops space from being gobbled up too quickly.
We’ve seen file sizes in games like Subnautica go from 14GB on PS4 to only 3.5GB on PS5, and Control Ultimate Edition is 39% smaller on PS5 than it is on Xbox Series X – 25.79GB compared to 42.5GB. If storage is cheaper and games are smaller in size on PS5, then that’s a value proposition that’s really appealing no matter how you shake it.
It may have taken longer than expected, then, but if you're tired of deleting games on your PS5's internal storage, there's never been a better time to buy a PS5 SSD, and there are plenty of good PlayStation 5 SSD deals to be had right now.
