Sony not doing PS5 storage expansion at launch is a bad call

Sony has confirmed to The Verge that the PS5 will not support storage expansion at launch. Instead, this support will be "reserved for a future update," according to the company.

We've known for some time that solid-state drive (SSD) compatibility on the PS5 was up in the air. As system architect Mark Cerny said in a tech breakdown, the internal SSD in the PS5 is so fast that not all NVMe M.2 SSDs will be able to keep up with it. It's a testament to what the engineers at Sony pulled off, but it makes it much harder for PlayStation fans to add some extra storage.

The PS5 only comes with an 825GB internal SSD, a strange call considering the standard for storage has mostly become 1TB. For reference, a good chunk of this is usually dedicated to running the OS, so realistically you have less than 825GB of usable storage. Launch games for the PS5 include Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War at 133GB, Spider-Man: Miles Morales at 50GB, and Demon's Souls at 66GB. That's nearly 250GB used for just three games. You can imagine that a handful more will immediately fill up the SSD.

That's unsustainable. Players should not be asked to continually delete and redownload games just because they run out of storage. Microsoft knows this and is releasing a 1TB SSD expansion card in partnership with Seagate for the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on Nov. 10. These cards connect through a dedicated port in the back of the consoles which then connects to the processor over the PCIe 4.0 interface.

If Microsoft figured this out for launch, Sony should have been able to as well. Storage is one of the most important aspects of a system. I use a 2TB external HDD and a 4TB external HDD for my PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, respectively, because I play so many games. Reserving this feature for a future update isn't good enough when your storage is already inferior to the competition in terms of raw space.

As of right now, we don't even know which SSD cards will be compatible with the PS5 at all. If you're looking to increase your PS5 storage, especially going into the holiday season, you'll want to hold off on buying any extra storage until we get an official list from Sony on which ones will be supported.