 Upgrading the PS5 looks messy. Strong disagree here. Microsoft's approach for now limits consumer choice, costs more, sacrifices performance, and, okay, yeah, 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 5 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, whatever, and you'll be ready to 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 slash LTT. The first key advantage of Sony's PS5 storage system is also its greatest weakness, choice. Thanks to its industry standard M.2 22110 slot, the PS5 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 PS5's performance standards at a fair price. Now Microsoft has had the upper hand thus far. Sony is only just now baiting this upgrade program. Well, Microsoft's co-branded Seagate storage expansion card has been available pretty much since day one for X-Bots with big game libraries. But the ball is now in Sony's court because $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, they're 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, well, 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 $1,000 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 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 5. 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. 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 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. Should be fine, I'm beta as f***. If your drive has a large cooler that prevents it from fitting in the PlayStation 5'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. You know, random thought, what would prevent you from just installing the SSD with its big, chungus heat sink on it and leaving this shield off? Anyway, let's fire it up. With our beta key redeemed, we 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 it may be incomplete or contain bugs and they are 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 wanna 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, wow, that was really fast. I was just going to peek at this because Seagate told us it was specifically made with the PlayStation 5 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. Console storage, installation location, PS5 games and apps, M.2 storage, just like that. So let's install the game, shall we? Obviously, we want the PS5 version. This will take a minute. Well, this is it. I thought maybe it would 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 pop-in or anything like that. There's enough distortion from the 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 detailed. 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. All right, 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. Do 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 Corsair at I think four and a half gigabytes per second, right? And five gigabytes per second reads. 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. Okay, 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 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. And I'm like, all right, all right, fair enough. Okay, if you experience problems while playing a game, install the NBOT2 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 have 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 specing 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 5 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 NBOT2 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 add-in SSD, even if you meet the recommended minimum speed of 5,500 megabytes per second. It should be noted that the PlayStation 5'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 5, 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 long-term, 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 a drive says that on the box, that doesn't actually tell you anything meaningful about that drive's performance characteristics. So 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 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 add-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 4 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 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 slash 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 5. David did a lot of work on that video and he did a great job.