Report: PS5 storage expansion will be available by summer

Enlarge / This style of PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD should soon work with the PS5, though that massive heatsink won't fit inside the system's expansion bay.

Bloomberg cites unnamed "people briefed on the matter" in reporting that PS5 owners will finally be able to expand the system's built-in storage by this coming summer. The planned firmware update that will unlock this feature will also allow for higher cooling-fan speeds on the system to prevent overheating, Bloomberg reports.

For games designed for the PS5, owners are currently limited to 667GB of usable space on the system's 825GB high-speed NVMe drive. That's a pretty strict limit when individual PS5 games can be 50 to 100GB or more at the high end. PS5 owners can plug in a standard USB hard drive to store backward-compatible PlayStation 4 games running on the system, though.

Almost a year ago, Sony announced that the PS5's storage space would be expandable with certain standard M.2 solid state drives, which are shaped a bit like a stick of gum. Sony said it would be benchmarking a number of those drives to ensure compatibility with the PS5's stated 5.5GBps data transfer spec. But Sony's Mark Cerny said at the time that the announcement of these officially confirmed PS5-compatible drives would "likely be a bit past" the PS5's launch.

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