With Sony's PS5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X next-gen consoles primed to launch between November 10th and November 19th globally, potential buyers are eager for every little tidbit of information that's still not official.
Today, a leaked picture posted on the ResetEra board could have revealed the actual usable storage space of the PS5 to be 664GB.
This would make sense, as Sony officially shared that the PS5 SSD size will be 825GB. Because of how computers work, that is to say in binary, 1GB actually equals 1,073,741,824 bytes instead of 1,000,000,000 bytes; this alone translates the 825GB figure into 768GB. If you add 104GB reserved for the PlayStation 5's OS, we've got 664GB of actually usable storage space.
For comparison, the Xbox Series X has an entirely similar configuration, though its starting point is considerably larger at 1TB of advertised storage space. As the recent hands-on articles and videos found out, the console reads the storage space as 930GB, of which there's 128GB reserved for the Series X's operating system. The grand total of actual usable storage space is, therefore, 802GB - or 138GB more than what's available with the PS5.
The main reason for this disparity is likely that Sony equipped the PlayStation 5 with a faster and more expensive custom-built SSD, which comes with a 12-channel interface and achieves 5.5GB/s of raw I/O throughput with uncompressed data (though that could go up to 17.38GB/s with compressed data thanks to the combined use of Oodle Kraken and Oodle Texture).
Microsoft opted for a slower NVMe SSD with the Xbox Series X, which achieves 2.4GB/s of raw I/O throughput with uncompressed data (here, too, the bandwidth can be much higher thanks to various compression techniques). This, in turn, allowed them to provide a bigger SSD.
Now, several gamers have expressed concerns for the relatively small storage space allowed by these consoles (the Xbox Series S has even bigger issues, starting from an advertised 512GB SSD), particularly in light of the ever-rising However, both Sony and Microsoft have already confirmed that it'll be possible to separately install single player and multiplayer modes in certain games, which should help a bit. Of course, both PS5 and Xbox Series X will be expandable, though again Sony and Microsoft have chosen two different paths even here.
The PS5 will be compatible with regular NVMe M.2 SSDs, though they'll have to be at least as fast as the one in the PS5. Microsoft, on the other hand, designed a proprietary 1TB SSD expansion card manufactured by Seagate and priced $220.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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