Following on the heels of Seagate with its FireCuda 530 announcement, Western Digital and GIGABYTE have now sprung out of the woodwork to declare that they also have SSDs that are perfectly compatible with PlayStation 5’s M.2 storage expansion slot, which, as indicated by a recent Sony support document, has been enabled as part of a new beta update. Western Digital told VGC in a recent statement that its WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSDs are essentially good to go for Sony’s next-gen console, while GIGABYTE tweeted something similar yesterday regarding its AORUS NVMe Gen4 SSDs. Available in 500 GB ($139.99), 1 TB ($249.99), and 2 TB ($429.99) capacities, Western Digital’s WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSDs with heat sink feature sequential read speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s, with the sequential write speed varying between models.
We’re PS5 ready 🎮 NVMe PCIe 4.0 ✅ Read speed 5500 ✅ Aluminum dual-sided thermal design ✅ pic.twitter.com/qUlN1oOhuR
— AORUS UK & IE in 4K 😎 (@AORUS_UK) July 30, 2021
“Based on Sony’s published requirements, we can confirm our WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD with Heatsink (500GB-2TB) meets the stated requirements to expand console storage on the PlayStation 5 for those with access to the PlayStation 5 Beta software. Compatibility testing is in progress.”
Sources: GIGABYTE, Western Digital (via VGC)