Expandable storage has existed for game consoles as far back I can really remember. Want extra space for Rock Band DLC on your Xbox 360 or need to pack a couple extra JRPGs onto your PlayStation Portable? Whether it’s a memory stick or a USB hard drive, you’ve long been able to upgrade the storage space on your handhelds or home consoles with relative ease.
Upgrading the storage on your PlayStation 5 is both simple and complicated at the same time. You need an M.2 SSD (a form factor that’s still pretty new), but it can’t just be any M.2 drive, it has to meet the high specifications to match the built in SSD of the console. That can be quite a headache to figure out, if you’re not clued up. Enter the Corsair MP600 PRO LPX, a perfectly PS5-compatible M.2 SSD from a trusted and well-known gaming peripheral brand that might be the best solution for a simple & painless storage upgrade.
Half the battle in upgrading your PS5 with an M.2 SSD is making sure your upgrade of choice meets all the requirements –getting the right physical size, a properly attached mini-heatsink, and read speeds of at least 5,500MB/s are the big ones. A lot of the best options require you to buy an SSD and a separate heatsink, but the Corsair MP600 PRO LPX is all-in-one – this SSD comes with a pre-installed heatsink that fits like a glove, and it boasts read-speeds of up to 7,100MB/s.
I can’t imagine tasking anyone lacking tech-savvy to understand any of this, so the fact that Corsair provides an easy to buy and already assembled solution for a PS5 storage upgrade is a major boon. The pricing is also fairly competitive if you shop around. The price on Corsair’s site is £110/$110 for the 500GB model, £190/$190 for the 1TB, £355/$370 for the 2TB, but the 1TB model can be found for £145 on Amazon, which is in the range on the popular Western Digital SN850 heatsink model. Find a good deal and this can be competitive even with SSDs that don’t have a heatsink.
The other half of the fight is actually installing the drive – which is definitely not as simple as plugging it into a USB slot. The Corsair MP600 PRO LPX lacks printed written instructions, but it comes with a scannable QR-code that takes you to a well-formatted web page outlining the entire installation process. The lack of physical instructions is a microscopic issue, as is the lack of a packed-in micro screwdriver when most homes will have a Phillips #1 lying around. Following the steps outlined in the instructions leads to a quick, 5-10 minute install process before you’re ready to plug your PS5 back in and start downloading.
The speed on the Corsair MP600 PRO LPX is no joke. The first-time formatting process to get the drive ready for use takes mere seconds, and the initial speed-test reported speeds of approximately 6,213MB/s – well above the beefy requirements outlined by Sony. After formatting (because I forgot to grab a screenshot), that figure dropped to around 5,800 MB/s, which is still more than enough for the PS5’s wants and needs.
I started my testing by transferring over 100GB of PlayStation 4 and 5 titles from my internal SSD to the new M.2, prepared to catch up on some weekly anime with how long I assumed the transfer would take. In just 85 seconds, though, it was completed. I transferred another big game – the 60GB+ install of Tekken 7 – and saw it breeze by and make a new home on my M.2 in barely 50 seconds. Coming from years of USB drives and mechanical hard-drives that took maybe an hour to install games that size, I was floored.
It isn’t just transfer speeds that shocked me, though. My 2TB model of the Corsair MP600 PRO LPX produced blinding game start-up speeds. King of Fighters 15 launched in barely 10 seconds, Aliens: Fireteam Elite loaded in about 8 seconds, and plenty of other games I tested loaded up just as fast as they would on the internal drive.
In-game speeds met the same benchmark. Games notable for boasting practically instant load-times like Final Fantasy VII Remake or Atelier Ryza 2 kept that performance up on the M.2 SSD. On top of all that, I noticed that PlayStation 4 games installed on the M.2 SSD didn’t create the dozens of extra GB of wasted “Other” data that they do when installed on the default drive.
All of this is by design, and a big part of why Sony give a minimum SSD read speed. These drives have to match everything that the internal SSD can do, so that developers can pull off the kinds of near-instant loading that lets Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart pull off its dimension-hopping tricks.
Once you have an M.2 SSD installed in your PS5, it’s a whole new world. The extra storage space is a lifesaver considering the massive size of most triple-A games, but the benefits it provides for PlayStation 4 titles that the internal SSD lacks are also incredible. The tricky part of expanding the PS5 is just figuring out what drives and heatsinks meet the requirements, and how to put all of it together. The Corsair MP600 PRO LPX is a quick and painless solution to all those roadblocks.
MrYd
It’s still expensive for an bit of extra storage. And a good chance SSD prices might not come down any time soon, or even increase. Not after someone accidentally contaminated 6.5 exabytes of the things in the factory. That’s 6.5 million gigabytes less available, so they’ll probably go up in price. Might actually be time to buy one right now.
Also, the mysterious growing “other” storage isn’t down to installing PS4 games on the internal SSD. With a complete factory reset (because power cuts used to make you do that with the PS5 – the last big firmware update seems to have downgraded the action needed after a power cut to “tell them off a bit”) and no PS4 games installed on the SSD, I’m up to a ridiculous 56GB of “other” storage I can’t get back.
Miguel Moran
Ugh, that’s a bummer that you’ve still got all that space being taken up in “Other” storage. PS4 game installs contribute to it, but they’re definitely not the ONLY reason for it – I might have just gotten lucky in that system updates and other stuff havent inflated my storage just yet.
colmshan1990
I bought a 1GB M2 drive from Amazon Germany for €135 in the January sales, very happy with it.
Pretty much matches everything in your review except it’s not Corsair, it’s ADATA. Was happily surprised after installation seeing that the full TB was available to use.
I’d have liked to have bought an even bigger size, and likely will in a few years- but 1TB was expensive enough already (the model I bought is already back up to €191 on the same website, it’s ridiculous!)
Miguel Moran
my favorite part was seeing the FULL file size available! I’m so used to seeing a “1TB hard drive” only give me around 800GB of storage space.