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Sony Officially Licenses PS5 SSD from Western Digital

Lunatic_Gamer

Gold Member
sony-western-digital-ps5-ssd.900x.jpg


Sony has collaborated with Western Digital to offer an officially licensed PS5 SSD that sports PlayStation branding. The SN850 NVMe SSD will wear the logo on its outer packaging, stating it is an "official licensed product" for PS5 consoles after undergoing hundreds of hours of testing.


wd-black-sn850-ps5-1tb-ww-front.900x.jpg


Sony and Western Digital came to the agreement after "spending hundreds of hours playing the most graphic-rich titles to ensure with games stored on the driver, gameplay is fast, smooth and visually immersive".


 

skit_data

Member
The blue LED seems so unnecessary? It will be literally impossible to see at any point when the console is on?
 

ToTTenTranz

Banned
This is just their regular SN850 drive in a box with the PS5 sticker, right?

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-ie/products/internal-drives/wd-black-sn850-nvme-ssd#WDS100T1XHE

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFS6THF/?tag=neogaf0e-20
(note: no need to buy a $30 more expensive model with heatsink installed.. just get the drive-only model, install a simple $4 NVMe heatsink with thermal sticker and it's done)


Though Sony's own Nextorage is a much better deal at the moment:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09RMHC8L8/?tag=neogaf0e-20
 

SkylineRKR

Member
I have this one since early this year. Its good but I would've gotten the Nextorage if I didn't right now. I paid about 170 w/ heatsink.
 

Mr Moose

Member
Mine arrived today, took less than 5 minutes to install from unplugging the PS5, attaching the ElecGear heatsink and throwing it back under the TV.
£85 on Amazon yesterday:messenger_smiling_hearts: now I am ready for Modern Warfare 2.
This is just their regular SN850 drive in a box with the PS5 sticker, right?

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-ie/products/internal-drives/wd-black-sn850-nvme-ssd#WDS100T1XHE

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFS6THF/?tag=neogaf0e-20
(note: no need to buy a $30 more expensive model with heatsink installed.. just get the drive-only model, install a simple $4 NVMe heatsink with thermal sticker and it's done)


Though Sony's own Nextorage is a much better deal at the moment:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09RMHC8L8/?tag=neogaf0e-20
Yeah it just comes as PS5 approved now with a new box, probably with the latest firmware.
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
ive had one of the wd black drives in my pc for a while now. good quality brand. when i replace mine though it wont be as slow as 7GB/s :messenger_smiling_with_eyes:
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
In what way?

The Samsung drive is the same speed.



Ok, but this fact alone does not imply the SN850 is better than the Samsung 980 PRO.
The SN850 is faster than the 980P in pretty much every metric, as you transfer more the gap grows.
Its not a massive difference but one product is clearly superior.
zwuxt7J.png


SIqc5WI.png


9aehY3m.png


ZtRPyhh.png
 

radewagon

Member
The SN850 is faster than the 980P in pretty much every metric, as you transfer more the gap grows.
Its not a massive difference but one product is clearly superior.
zwuxt7J.png


SIqc5WI.png


9aehY3m.png


ZtRPyhh.png
It's clearly better, however I wonder what the chance is that we'll see a substantial difference in the overall PS5 user experience. They are both great drives and I'd guess that any benefit would be almost imperceptible.
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
It's clearly better, however I wonder what the chance is that we'll see a substantial difference in the overall PS5 user experience. They are both great drives and I'd guess that any benefit would be almost imperceptible.
The PS5 is fine at ~PCIE3 speeds so even the slowest PCIE4 drive will get the job done.
We are talking a second at worst and milliseconds usually.

The SN850 and Fire530 are current kings with 980P being overpriced IMO considering it drops speed when stressed.
 
The SN850 is faster than the 980P in pretty much every metric, as you transfer more the gap grows.
Its not a massive difference but one product is clearly superior.
zwuxt7J.png


SIqc5WI.png


9aehY3m.png


ZtRPyhh.png

Thanks for finding this. I was looking for a technical comparison but couldn't find anything.

Thankfully it's mostly the same in read speeds. Write speeds aren't really important for gaming. So in the areas that matter they're broadly neck and neck.

So I don't need to feel any buyers remorse for buying the Samsung drive instead of this one :p
 

50PlusGamer

Neo Member
The PS5 is fine at ~PCIE3 speeds so even the slowest PCIE4 drive will get the job done.
We are talking a second at worst and milliseconds usually.

The SN850 and Fire530 are current kings with 980P being overpriced IMO considering it drops speed when stressed.

Source?

Personally I don't think you can go wrong with either of them. I bought the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB at $289 but for $207.99 I would have bought the Western Digital instead. Although I feel like long term reliability would concern me more with the WD based on my past hard drive experiences.
 

Aenima

Member
As long as the price remains low, its a cool thing to facilitate things for consumers that have no idea what drives shold get. Glad they picked the SSD Cerny got as well.
 

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
Life must be good for the few people on earth who know how to use a screwdriver, they get their storage 100 dollars cheaper than most of the Xbox offerings!
as a guy who owns a Series S, the storage thing is such a fucking bother, 360gb is just not enough and i'm not gonna shell out 200 for 1tb of measly storage. Xbox needs to lower the prices on their proprietary stuff quick or they're going to look absurdly expensive in comparison
 
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Awesome! This is the one I bought, at 2TB too.

Always seemed like the flagship SSD since the PS5 started supporting additional storage. Makes sense.
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Source?

Personally I don't think you can go wrong with either of them. I bought the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB at $289 but for $207.99 I would have bought the Western Digital instead. Although I feel like long term reliability would concern me more with the WD based on my past hard drive experiences.
Source for what?
 
This is just their regular SN850 drive in a box with the PS5 sticker, right?

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-ie/products/internal-drives/wd-black-sn850-nvme-ssd#WDS100T1XHE

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFS6THF/?tag=neogaf0e-20
(note: no need to buy a $30 more expensive model with heatsink installed.. just get the drive-only model, install a simple $4 NVMe heatsink with thermal sticker and it's done)


Though Sony's own Nextorage is a much better deal at the moment:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09RMHC8L8/?tag=neogaf0e-20

Phison’s Nextorage you mean.
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Basis of your attempt to lure people into buying a misguided lower than Sony’s recommended specs for shits and goggles hehe ;).

You know why.
Watch the thread now go off in the direction of some insecure spec war.
If im warrioring anything its against Samsung to help people save a buck or two.

As is right now any Gen4 drive will be within a second of the internal drive because the PS5 still uses HW compression/decompression so you dont really need to saturate the PCIE4 lanes to match internal speeds.
Even going well below spec the rest of the I/O pipeline picks up the slack.

vRRtSTe.jpg


The SN750 is basically in PCIE3 land.....the SN850 near saturates all available bandwidth of PCIE4x4

Maybe games in the future will really stress I/O forcing the minspec to matter but as is right now no game "requires" that minspec.
 

ToTTenTranz

Banned
If im warrioring anything its against Samsung to help people save a buck or two.

As is right now any Gen4 drive will be within a second of the internal drive because the PS5 still uses HW compression/decompression so you dont really need to saturate the PCIE4 lanes to match internal speeds.
Even going well below spec the rest of the I/O pipeline picks up the slack.

vRRtSTe.jpg


The SN750 is basically in PCIE3 land.....the SN850 near saturates all available bandwidth of PCIE4x4

Maybe games in the future will really stress I/O forcing the minspec to matter but as is right now no game "requires" that minspec.

The first wave of games was most probably developed with PCIe3 SSDs in mind, on early devkits that were PCs with a Radeon 5700 and some x86 CPU.
That's why those games are probably using no more than PCIe3 4x of I/O bandwidth, and I'd even bet most of those are also using CPU-based decompression.

I'd bet Devs didn't have access to the PS5's dedicated decompressor until 2020 on final hardware devkits, and that's why that module is still underutilized to this day (covid delayed production of pretty much all games).
 

BabyYoda

Banned
Mine arrived today, took less than 5 minutes to install from unplugging the PS5, attaching the ElecGear heatsink and throwing it back under the TV.
£85 on Amazon yesterday:messenger_smiling_hearts: now I am ready for Modern Warfare 2.

Yeah it just comes as PS5 approved now with a new box, probably with the latest firmware.
The jerks jacked the price up £35 since then because of the demand, for that, I'll get a different brand just to spite them (for PC).
 
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Mr Moose

Member
The jerks jacked the price up £35 since then because of the demand, for that, I'll get a different brand just to spite them (for PC).
I think the deal was for one day only, a Prime Day thing, £85 for Prime members and £90 for non-members.
 

Tripolygon

Banned
The first wave of games was most probably developed with PCIe3 SSDs in mind, on early devkits that were PCs with a Radeon 5700 and some x86 CPU.
That's why those games are probably using no more than PCIe3 4x of I/O bandwidth, and I'd even bet most of those are also using CPU-based decompression.

I'd bet Devs didn't have access to the PS5's dedicated decompressor until 2020 on final hardware devkits, and that's why that module is still underutilized to this day (covid delayed production of pretty much all games).
The simplest explanation is that the IO unit is doing what it is intended to do, make the work transparent to developers, with a generous enough cache, the difference would not be noticeable unless you time it side by side.

Like I kept saying, you don't necessarily need to match the internal SSD speed for your experience to be similar, give or take 1 or 2 seconds.
 
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