PS5 M.2 drives compared and tested
Speaker 1: Does it matter? What kind of M two drives you add to your PlayStation? Five, to have more room for games. I tested a Seagate, a Corsa and a Samsung. And here's what I found.
Speaker 1: Any game console you buy now, it's basically not gonna have enough storage for you to store all the games that you want. Even the PlayStation five, you got a 800 something, gigabyte, internal hard drive. Then there's system files and stuff. After that, you've got a little bit less than 700 gigs [00:00:30] of space, but that's still not enough for modern video games. Your average game is somewhere between 25 and 40 gigs. A lot of games are 80 gigs. Some are over a hundred gigabytes in terms of their file size. That's how much space they're gonna eat up on your hard drive. You know, casual games in the games. Those gonna be a lot smaller, but really we're talking about the mainstream games that eat up a ton of space. You're not gonna have room for more than a handful on your PlayStation five. Now what Sony did that was pretty clever here is they included an extra drive [00:01:00] slot inside the plays and five, you can pop open the, uh, cover of the system and inside there's an empty slot that takes something called it M two drive.
Speaker 1: And when you slot it in screw down, the little screws, reboot, your PlayStation five recognizes it automatically. You set a couple options about where you want new content saved to, and you're set these M dot two drives can store PS four and PS five. And more importantly, they can play PS4 and PS five games before if you plugged in an external hard drive, you could store everything, but you [00:01:30] can only play PS4 games off that external drive. You had to transfer the games back to the internal storage to play PS five games. So this way we're able to greatly increase sometimes triple or more, the storage, the in internal storage capacity of our PS five. So does it matter which one you get my team? And I decided to try that out by taking three different M two drives all specifically marketed as being really great for the PlayStation five and doing some data transfer tests, using different games on them.
Speaker 1: [00:02:00] So we tried the Seagate fire KU five 30, the Samsung nine 80 pro, and the Corsair MP 600 pro LPX. These are all M two drives that have the heat sink built in. You can get 'em in different capacities from one terabyte to, I think about four terabytes. And we each installed one of these drives, took a couple of games and did some transfer tests using a stopwatch to time the speed. Now, what did we do? We took a medium size game and we took a fairly large size game. We took the game and we [00:02:30] transferred it from the internal PlayStation five hard drive to the, uh, M two drive that was in the internal M two slot. So one transfer going that way. Then we transferred the game back to the original internal hard drive. We timed that we did that with a Spiderman miles Morales.
Speaker 1: And then we did that with final fantasy seven, the remake, the PlayStation five version of that. I'm gonna tell ya they all scored just about the same, literally within seconds of each other. That leads me to conclude that you can pretty much get any compatible [00:03:00] M two drive. It's gonna work fine. I wouldn't worry too much about getting one model versus the other, at least out of the three mainstream models that we tested going from the PlayStation five drive to the M two drive. The course air was the absolute fastest for final fantasy seven, but again, just by a handful of seconds, it was a minute forward versus a minute five and a minute eight, uh, for spider in miles Morales. Again, everything was either 31 or 33 seconds. I'd call that functionally a complete tie going back the other way. [00:03:30] Once again, the course here with a tiny bit faster, literally just by seconds, going from that M two drive back to the internal PlayStation five drive on final fan to C seven.
Speaker 1: And it looks like it was basically tied with the Samsung on Spiderman. And again, the Seagate was like three seconds slower. So functionally the same again. So I think it's safe to say, if you find any of these PS five compatible M two drives, especially if it's a handy versions with the heat sync built in, you can feel safe doing that. You're gonna get excellent performance, no matter which brand you choose. [00:04:00] If you want to find out more about PlayStation five M two drives or anything else I've talked about, you can find links in the description below. I also feel safe saying that no matter what console you have, whether it's a PlayStation five Xbox series X or S Nintendo switch, you are gonna want to eventually add additional storage to it because frankly given the size of games and the fact almost all games are downloaded now, rather than played off a disc or a card or anything physical like that, you're gonna run outta space. And none of these devices have enough internal storage built in. [00:04:30] You can check our PlayStation five list of the best M two drives for your PS five to see which drives are in stock, how much they cost, what capacities are available. And of course, we'll also keep that article updated with all the testing data that we do on these drives and future drives that we test.
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