On average, I saw write speeds of around 1,100MB/s transferring my five test games to either of my add-in M.2 drives, but just around 220MB/s sending those same games back to the PS5.
It took only 2:26 to send both PS5 and PS4 copies of Final Fantasy VII Remake to the Sabrent SSD, for instance, but 12:47 to go back to the PS5 - over five times longer. I also didn’t necessarily see a huge difference between the drives when it comes to transferring games back and forth, but there was one big surprise: at least in this beta, it appears that Sony may be throttling the write speed of the PS5’s own internal drive. Stepping through pocket dimensions was instantaneous, and when there was a slight pause during a boss fight, I saw the same pause on the internal SSD as well.Īverage measured from PS5 homescreen to active gameplay. Hopping through dimensions in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, I saw no appreciable difference with the slowest SSD in gameplay, either. Sometimes it’s a second slower, sometimes a second or two faster, but basically it’s a total wash. The verdict? Surprisingly, even the slowest compatible SSD we could find had near-identical load times to the one Sony includes in the box.
#Ps5 download speed test archive
We also measured how long it takes to back up games to each kind of drive, throwing in a Seagate external HDD for comparison, since Sony now allows you to archive PS5 games and play PS4 games from an traditional hard drive. We compared the S50 Lite against both the PS5’s internal SSD and a 5,000MB/s Sabrent Rocket 500GB in a battery of tests, including load times for games like early PS5 showcases Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart and Spider-Man: Miles Morales. The short version: today’s games don’t need all the speed. And this week, Digital Foundry corroborated our findings with an even slower SSD with 3,200MB/s writes. That’s why we tracked down an ADATA XPG Gammix S50 Lite, one of the slowest compatible PCIe Gen4 drives we could find at 3,900MB/s reads and 3,200MB/s writes, and stuck it into a PS5 in August. That might leave you wondering, though: what about slower SSDs? My colleague Mitchell has a PS5 SSD buying guide right here that meets all of Sony’s recommendations, such as speeds of at least 5,500MB/s.
#Ps5 download speed test update
Sony’s new update for the PS5, released in full on September 14th, allows you to expand your paltry 667GB of usable space by popping in the same sort of M.2 SSD stick you might slip into your laptop or desktop PC. If your PS5 is already running out of speedy solid state storage, there’s a fix.