The PlayStation 5 is an enormous leap forward into the next generation of gaming, with a super speedy SSD, eye-popping visual clarity and sharpness, and the brilliant capabilities of the DualSense controller. What if I told you its loading times could be even faster with this handy-dandy how to?
Digital Foundry is the source of this report and it used a collection of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 titles to test whether shelling out for a Samsung 980 Pro 500GB SSD decreases loading times on the console. When the PlayStation 5's specifications were announced, it stated that the internal SSD weighs in at 825GB. That is and isn't true. The SSD is that size, however, the operating system absorbs 158GB of the storage space to run the console. Therefore, the PlayStation 5 has about 667GB available to use. Think of it like baking a cake. From a kilogram bag of flour, you scoop 300 grams of it into a mixing bowl. You still have a kilogram of flour in your kitchen but it's split between two uses.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is one of our favourite games of 2021, and it uses the PlayStation 5's souped-up specs to deliver a magical adventure. Check out our review below...
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Actually adding expandable external storage to the PlayStation 5 is a headache and a half when compared to the straightforwardness of the Xbox Series X. If the merest mention of skinning and gutting your console to install an SSD has you weak in the knees, then Sony has a support page for you here. Anyway, while testing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 4, Final Fantasy XV and Battlefield V, it was found that using the Samsung 980 Pro 500GB SSD shaved a few seconds off the loading times for some of the busiest levels in these selected games.
For example, loading the city centre of Novigrad in The Witcher 3 takes about 48 seconds when using the internal SSD. In contrast, it takes 44.67 seconds when using the Samsung SSD with a heatsink. "Across all of our tests here, a trend is clear: using the Samsung 980 Pro in the expansion bay, loading times are generally better than they are on the internal drive," concluded Digital Foundry. "There seems to be an advantage in adding a heatsink to the NVMe SSD too, albeit slight."
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PlayStation 5 titles like A Plague Tale: Innocence and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order also saw a slight dip in the time taken, but I mean a very slight dip. And, regarding transfer speeds, hoiking games off the internal storage to an external SSD is blisteringly quick. Cyberpunk 2077 is 101GB all in all, and it took only one minute and 11 seconds to write the entire game to the Samsung 980 Pro. But, when transferring games from the SSD to the internal storage, that's when you'll want to pop the kettle on and twiddle your thumbs for a while.
Eh, we can't have it all, but expandable storage gets us most of the way there with the PlayStation 5.
Featured Image Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment, Totte Annerbrink via UnsplashTopics: PlayStation 5, News, PlayStation