Samsung made a 980 Pro SSD specifically for PlayStation 5 owners

[nanoguy]

In brief: If you've been looking for an easy way to expand the internal storage of your PlayStation 5, Samsung made a unique model of the 980 Pro SSD for Sony's console. It comes in 1-terabyte and 2-terabyte versions, has a heatsink to help during prolonged gaming sessions, and can easily exceed Sony's recommended sequential speed for a PlayStation 5 expansion drive.

The PlayStation 5’s internal SSD is so fast that it forced Epic to rewrite parts of the Unreal Engine 5 to account for the speedier storage architecture in the new console. That said, the advertised storage capacity is 825 gigabytes, of which users can use only a maximum of 667 gigabytes to hold their game library. Depending on the size of your games, you’re likely to run into space issues even if you use Sony’s compression technology to reduce installation sizes.

Also read: The most exciting games coming to the PlayStation 5

Modern AAA titles are ballooning in size every year, with some like Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War approaching 300 gigabytes. Other notable offenders are Spider-Man Miles Morales (170.5 gigabytes), Hitman 3 (105 gigabytes), Destiny 2 (101 gigabytes), NBA 2K22 (93 gigabytes), The Last of Us 2 (93 gigabytes), Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut (91 gigabytes), Mortal Kombat 11 (84 gigabytes), Rainbow Six Siege Ultimate Edition (68 gigabytes), Cyberpunk 2077 (64 gigabytes), FIFA 21 (56 gigabytes), Demon’s Souls (53 gigabytes), and Dirt 5 (53 gigabytes).

Enter the M.2 expansion port on the PlayStation 5 to the rescue. Sony officially added M.2 software support last month, which means you can now add up to 4 terabytes of fast storage to your console. Samsung today announced it redesigned its excellent 980 Pro SSD specifically for Sony's console and coupled it with a heatsink that will easily fit in the available space of the PlayStation 5's expansion slot.

The company says a heatsink is necessary to deliver sustained speeds of up to 7,000 megabytes per second for sequential reads and up to 5,100 megabytes per second for sequential writes. The dimensions are 24mm (W), 80mm (L), and 8.6mm (H), which are a perfect fit for the PlayStation 5 SSD slot, but you’ll be able to install this in a desktop PC just as well if you have enough clearance from other components.

As for when you’ll be able to buy one, it will become available at retailers and on Samsung’s online store on October 29. The 1-terabyte model will set you back $249.99, and the 2-terabyte model will be priced at $449.99. Both come with a 5-year warranty.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/91720-samsung-made-980-pro-ssd-specifically-playstation-5.html

 

[VitalyT]

Is this anything more than a marketing move at selling more drives at premium to PS5 users?

I bought my Samsung 2TB 980 Pro about 3 month ago, and have been using it heavily daily, without ever needing any heat sink. I use it as my system drive + for all my storage-intensive projects. It never over-heated.

 

[yRaz]

Is this anything more than a marketing move at selling more drives at premium to PS5 users?

I bought my Samsung 2TB 980 Pro about 3 month ago, and have been using it heavily daily, without ever needing any heat sink. I use it as my system drive + for all my storage-intensive projects. It never over-heated.

IIRC, it isn't the flash storage that creates the heat, it's the storage controller and internal memory. The type of workloads that are likely to generate tons of heat would kill an SSD by eating up all its writes in a few weeks. Your workloads are probably intermittent enough that you don't give the drive a reason to throttle or its cache is big enough that you never notice it.

It is interesting to note that we are fast approaching NVME speeds where you can kill a drive in under a week if you want to

 

[Burty117]

It is interesting to note that we are fast approaching NVME speeds where you can kill a drive in under a week if you want to

I've had my 970 Pro for a few years now, only written 70TB~ to it in all that time so not worried about it.

You're right though, if you wanted to kill something like this Samsung, you could do it pretty quickly at it's sustained speeds. Makes you wonder if we'll see a return to virus's that just want to harm computers. You could hide a virus just randomly writing to the drive all the time without having proper protection on your machine and you wouldn't notice a performance dip much since there's so much performance headroom.

I read the other day that they're looking into anti-virus that runs directly on the controller of the SSD, it can pickup patterns, alert the OS and even stop it. Interesting how as speeds increase, so does the dangers of destroying a drive quicker.

 

[brucek]

The traditional benefits that maybe justify the additional cost of Samsung's Pro SSD line for certain less common PC workloads do not seem like a good match for the needs of PS5 storage???

 

[kiwigraeme]

Is this anything more than a marketing move at selling more drives at premium to PS5 users?

I bought my Samsung 2TB 980 Pro about 3 month ago, and have been using it heavily daily, without ever needing any heat sink. I use it as my system drive + for all my storage-intensive projects. It never over-heated.

Well considering quite a few of the people paying over the top prices for a PS5 - samsung has probably got this right - plus I'd imagine Sony either gets a cut or an upfront fee - or some kind of deal .
I'll still wait for the PS5 V2 with 2 TBs( or 4Tb Pro if lucky ) and a bundle- lol looks like I may be waiting at least 2 more years - with chip/shipping woes- saying that They will hopefully get updated chips ( at least more efficient will all the speed of new tech )

 

[elementalSG]

Now, if only I was able to not have to pay an arm and leg first for the PlayStation 5 console…

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Xbox and PS5 are the BEST arguments for switching to PC Gaming I've ever seen.

 

[yRaz]

I've had my 970 Pro for a few years now, only written 70TB~ to it in all that time so not worried about it.

You're right though, if you wanted to kill something like this Samsung, you could do it pretty quickly at it's sustained speeds. Makes you wonder if we'll see a return to virus's that just want to harm computers. You could hide a virus just randomly writing to the drive all the time without having proper protection on your machine and you wouldn't notice a performance dip much since there's so much performance headroom.

I read the other day that they're looking into anti-virus that runs directly on the controller of the SSD, it can pickup patterns, alert the OS and even stop it. Interesting how as speeds increase, so does the dangers of destroying a drive quicker.

I did the math after saying what I said, you could kill the 1tb version of this drive in about a day and a half if you wanted to. 5GB/s@600TBW is about 33 hours.

It makes me wonder, what is the purpose of such speeds? The only limiting factor is the bus speeds. It's cool and I'm not going to.say "no" to faster drives, I just don't get it. My computer already turns on and games load instantly. I've actually noticed that my ram speeds are the bottleneck on load times, not drive speed. Going from 2133 to 2400 on my server basically doubled load performance.

 

[Adeelyboi]

Xbox and PS5 are the BEST arguments for switching to PC Gaming I've ever seen.

Respectfully I disagree. It has done the exact opposite for me. I have a very decent pc with a 3080 and 5900x. I got a PS5 a few months ago. It’s all hooked up to an LG oled.


Not that I’ve had much time to play games lately but the PS5 has really messed things up for my PC.

This gen the graphics are so close on console that it just highlights all the crappy bugs and set up issues that you have to put up with on a PC. Last gen I felt PC was a quantifiable step up from a PS4 but this gen the PS5 has the ssd, 90% of the graphics quality (seriously whatever Digital Foundry may say the differences are minimal especially if you play on a big screen tv like me) and none of the headaches you get with PC. Game pass on pc is a frustrating pile of crap to use with constant bugs. To be fair to PC, Steam is much more reliable.

But with the pandemic woes, PC gaming is more expensive than ever with stupid parts prices. I might be an “enthusiast” but do I really think PC gaming is worth it now over console? NOPE definitely not.

But hey at least my PC does RGB! Suck on that consoles!

Don’t get me wrong I’m not trying at all to hate on PC and I completely understand that different people have different useages but if you just play games like I do (I have a laptop for work stuff) then I think it’s very difficult to justify the cost of a pc this current gen.

 

[dangh]

Xbox and PS5 are the BEST arguments for switching to PC Gaming I've ever seen.

I think you missed gpu prices atm...

 

[jpuroila]

I did the math after saying what I said, you could kill the 1tb version of this drive in about a day and a half if you wanted to. 5GB/s@600TBW is about 33 hours.

It makes me wonder, what is the purpose of such speeds? The only limiting factor is the bus speeds. It's cool and I'm not going to.say "no" to faster drives, I just don't get it. My computer already turns on and games load instantly. I've actually noticed that my ram speeds are the bottleneck on load times, not drive speed. Going from 2133 to 2400 on my server basically doubled load performance.

You're confusing the rated endurance with the actual endurance. If you look at any testing done, you'll find that the actual endurance is typically much higher. Granted, at those speeds we're still talking about a matter of days, but it's not quite as bad as it might at first appear.

 

[Kosmoz]

That said, the advertised storage capacity is 825 gigabytes, of which users can use only a maximum of 667 gigabytes to hold their game library. Depending on the size of your games, you’re likely to run into space issues even if you use Sony’s compression technology to reduce installation sizes.

The same issue applies to XSX and it's 1TB SSD, the actual storage space is only 802GB, because of the system files.

So XSX has 135GB more, that's nothing. You can fit 1 or 2 extra games. Also that compression tech PS5 has is amazing and it does reduce a lot of the game size, for those games that take advantage of it, proven numerous times until now.

So in the end considering the compression tech and SSD sizes, they are not that much different and both require an upgrade if you plan to have more then 10-15 games installed all the time.

I would not be surprised if the PS5 Pro and next Series console that comes in 2023 will have 2TB SDDs as standard.

 

[Jarenien]

Lol, they are gonna charge $450 for the 2TB with the heatsink? Just buy it yourself for like $322, and get a $20 heatsink, and you save over $100 for maybe 5-min of work installing it. This "deal" is really for the lazy and/or stupid I s'pose?

 

[hahahanoobs]

Thank the gods gen 4 NVMe isn't as important of an upgrade compared to HDD vs SSD.

$249? At this rate I'll purposely be staying at least one gen behind unless something changes when it comes to NVMe tech.

 

[netman]

"The 1-terabyte model will set you back $249.99, and the 2-terabyte model will be priced at $449.99."

There is no Set Back if you are willingly purchase the storage...!

 

[BadThad]

Seems over-priced, super fast, 2TB NVME drives are about $350 today for the PC.