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[A Regular Guy]

Discuss

 

[Arkam]

Discuss

Give us a written summary first

 

[RoadHazard]

Games can't be played from external storage anyway, so this feels rather uninteresting.

 

[ethomaz]

Give us a written summary first

PlayStation 5: the best external SSD upgrade options tested

Digital Foundry test the best external SSDs for PS5, with game load time comparisons for PS4 games.

www.eurogamer.net

Overall, there are a few key takeaways here. Firstly, you can take comfort knowing that an external SSD loads games as fast - and sometimes even marginally faster - than your PS5's internal drive. It's great news because it frees up space for actual PS5 apps that can't be run from external storage. Secondly, our tests suggest that don't have to fork out a fortune for a top-of-the line NVMe drive when it comes to adding extra storage to the PlayStation 5. There seems to be a limit to how fast PS4 back-combat titles load on PS5 regardless of drive - and a SATA SSD maxes this out well enough. As far as getting the best bang for the buck in terms of a storage upgrade for PS4 titles, a SATA SSD connected via a SATA to USB cable is a great option. It's exactly the same recommendation we had for Xbox Series X, funnily enough. Just make sure you have a UART SATA-III enabled USB to SATA bridge.

As we've stated though, there are some curious anomalies in our data. Firstly, the NVMe drive under-performs. In pure write operations, it beats the SATA drive by some distance but in terms of read operations, it's essentially on par with the SATA drive. Either the enclosure isn't PS5-friendly (though it works to spec on PC and obviously, write speeds are faster on PS5) or else the new Sony console has a cap on read speeds, which seems more likely. Secondly, after our Xbox Series X testing, we expected external SSDs to match the internal drive but to see occasional results where our off-the-shelf drives beat the PS5's internal drive is unexpected. Again, these tests were re-run with the same result. Even so, the strange-looking results don't change the results of our tests and the conclusions remain the same - a good SATA drive is perfectly adequate for running PS4 games on PS5. The Samsung 870 QVO isn't even the fastest SATA drive available.

Basically it runs very fast but due the PS4 Pro / PS4 hardware emulation limitations it can't go over what SATA interface allows.
That happens probably because in BC Mode the system emulates a SATA controller using the PS5's SSD controller that is what PS4 games works with.

 

[Tchu-Espresso]

This proves how little the PS5 is utilised in backwards compatibility titles.

When Miles Morales loads in 2 seconds, you know good things are coming in the future.

 

[RiccochetJ]

Games can't be played from external storage anyway, so this feels rather uninteresting.

Last gen games can be played from the external drive. Just not PS5 specific games. They showed games like Battlefield, Fallout 4, and Cyberpunk being played from the external drive.

So like for my XBSX, I have the 360 games on a 5TB external, XB1 games on an external SSD, and then current gen installed on my internal and I just swap them out to an external if I'm space constrained. You can do something similar for the PS5..

What's interesting is in their testing Fallout 4 loads faster from an external SSD than it does on the internal drive. Also interesting is that it looks like it's a bit painful writing back to the internal hard drive. The external SSDs were barely an improvement over the mechanical hard drive when writing back to the internal drive.

 

[A Regular Guy]

Give us a written summary first

Okay, overall, the External SSD NVNE slightly more faster than the PS5's internal NVMe when playing PS4 BC titles.

 

[jroc74]

This proves how little the PS5 is utilised in backwards compatibility titles.

When Miles Morales loads in 2 seconds, you know good things are coming in the future.

Yeah, I dont see how this is even clickbait, lol.

I think its been known for months how the PS5 handles BC wrt the SSD. And just games overall.

 

[assurdum]

It is unexpected they said

 

[Riky]

Remembering those who insisted PS4 games would load on PS5 in one second PS4 Pro even loads faster on some titles with the same drive.

 

[modiz]

Limited BC is limited. Sony probably saw games breaking with their bc solution and thus made an IO limit for BC games.

 

[assurdum]

Remembering those who insisted PS4 games would load on PS5 in one second PS4 Pro even loads faster on some titles with the same drive.

If we have to remember all the absurdity you said dude...

 

[Low Moral Fibre]

The games definitely need to be designed around the SSD.

I tried the same Cyberpunk save that took 41.1 seconds on PS5 internal on PC and it was around 10 seconds. My SSD is 2.5GB/s and PS5 is 5.5GB/s or something?

 

[jm89]

870 qvo is cheap and always on sale, no need to really spend any more with it matching the internal for PS4 games.

 

[Trogdor1123]

Lots of Gaas games get ps5 patches, does that make them a ps5 game or can you run those games from an external drive?

 

[geordiemp]

Remembering those who insisted PS4 games would load on PS5 in one second PS4 Pro even loads faster on some titles with the same drive.

I think everyone one GAF understands that a Ps4 or Ps5 game, if loading using the ps5 loading specfic hardware (decompression hardware) it will load in a few seconds and they do for games that use the ps5 hardware to load..

Also everyone would understand if a game is contacting a server or chooses to show the usual information from the game makers there will be an artificial pause - which is a choice of developer.

I also believe everyone would know that if the ps5 is not using its custom hardware to load games fast, they wont. Hence ps4 games or even ps5 games that dont use the ps5 hardware to decompress and fast load. Luckily cross gen games and games that dont use ps5 hardware are starting to fade.

However, there are a few posters who struggle to understand this simplest of simple concepts, amazing is it not ?

 

[ethomaz]

Lots of Gaas games get ps5 patches, does that make them a ps5 game or can you run those games from an external drive?

PS4 patches games to run on PS5 are still PS4 games.... they run via BC.

 

[Trogdor1123]

PS4 patches games to run on PS5 are still PS4 games.... they run via BC.

That's what I thought too. Would have been nice to see some data on those games.

 

[RoadHazard]

Last gen games can be played from the external drive. Just not PS5 specific games. They showed games like Battlefield, Fallout 4, and Cyberpunk being played from the external drive.

So like for my XBSX, I have the 360 games on a 5TB external, XB1 games on an external SSD, and then current gen installed on my internal and I just swap them out to an external if I'm space constrained. You can do something similar for the PS5..

What's interesting is in their testing Fallout 4 loads faster from an external SSD than it does on the internal drive. Also interesting is that it looks like it's a bit painful writing back to the internal hard drive. The external SSDs were barely an improvement over the mechanical hard drive when writing back to the internal drive.

Yeah, I bought my PS5 to play new games though. Sure, I'll play some PS4 games on it, but I'm not too worried about the HDD speed for those.

 

[Consumer]

I recently watched this video and don't understand why DF went through the trouble of using a SATA SSD rather than an enclosed USB SSD; can anyone fill me in?

As far as I understand, the superior performance of SATA would be nullified since it's being adapted to a USB interface

 

[Schmick]

Remembering those who insisted PS4 games would load on PS5 in one second PS4 Pro even loads faster on some titles with the same drive.

FFS Riky, people get tired enough having Sony fanboys derailing Xbox threads and here you are doing the exact same thing. It's embarrassing.

 

[GHG]

FFS Riky, people get tired enough having Sony fanboys derailing Xbox threads and here you are doing the exact same thing. It's embarrassing.