Making Sense Of The PS5 SSD Array
Back in March when Sony unveiled the hardware powering the PlayStation 5, it left many of us scratching our heads as to why they went with 825GB for storage space. Yet now we have our first look inside of the console, it’s clear why. The teardown shows that Sony went with a six drive array. That’s right, the PS5 doesn’t have one SSD, it has six. The PS5 packs six TH58LJT0T24BA4C Toshiba BiCS 3D memory flash chips. Each Toshiba chip is 128 GiB or just over 137GB. The six drives are powered by a custom SSD controller to make it all work as one.
Sony has used a fairly amazing technique to keep the storage close to the CPU while maximizing space on the system board. The PS5 has a floor of 5.5 GB/s when it comes to transferring data. VHerald is reporting that the number could reach as high is 17 GB/s. Not all of the details today have been great news for PlayStation fans. Unfortunately, this seems to bear fruit to the recent leak that the PS5 may only have 664GB of free space. While the odd number of 825 GB was often assumed to be the storage space available to the player out of the box. Certainly, this can no longer be the case.
Additionally, this could explain why we don’t have a removable storage option for the PS5 yet. Back in February PS5 architect, Mark Cerny did note the technology would be hitting stores this year as consumer computer parts. Even so, there would have to be something that works in conjunction with this technique while not altering I/O throughput (transfer speeds). Although there should be NVME SSD’s compatible with the PS5 for consumers this year. It might be best to wait for the prices to drop. The PS5 will still allow PS4 games to be played from external drives, just not PS5 games.