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It seemed a little strange to me that while Mark Cerny talked us all through the performance boosts of the upcoming PS5 Pro, he forgot to mention that it will house an upgraded 2TB SSD inside it. That extra storage space might help to justify the price of the console, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me as a selling point. The PS5 has had an additional SSD port in it since launch, and one of the console’s best features has been the ability to boost its storage with drives that are actually faster than Sony’s custom SSD.
If the price tag of the PS5 Pro is out of reach for you, a storage upgrade to your existing PS5 is probably the best way to give your gaming life a quality of life boost without breaking the bank. Take this Corsair MP600 Elite 1TB SSD, for instance. It’s currently discounted down from $94.99 to $84.99 at Amazon, and its integrated heatsink means installing it will take very little effort.
A $10 price cut isn’t exactly huge, but for one of the top-performing drives I’ve ever tested for PS5, this is a great price to pay. The best SSDs for PS5 have been a lot pricier in the last year, and you’re lucky if you can find a PS5-ready option for under $90 - even if it was released in 2022. This deal at Amazon brings an SSD made by a premium brand down to the cost that budget brands charge, so I can’t express how good an opportunity it is.
Should you buy the Corsair MP600 Elite?
I test SSDS for a living, and so far, this is my favorite PS5 SSD to come out in 2024. It takes the benefits of the previous Corsair MP600 drives and boosts them to new heights, with faster read and write speeds and a beautiful design.
In fact, the design of the integrated heatsink is one of the reasons I’d argue it stands out from the rest of the PS5 SSD crowd. There’s breathing space between this drive’s heatsink and its bottom, meaning more airflow can help to keep it cool from both sides, which other drives neglect.
What might surprise you is that this SSD actually boasts faster read and write speeds than the internal drive of the PS5, pulling in sequential read and write speeds of 7,038MB/s and 6,500MB/s when we tested it. That means that if you transfer your games onto this, they’ll actually load slightly faster than they would from the console’s built-in storage. Full disclosure, the PS5 is unable to divert power to the secondary M.2 bay in the same way that a gaming PC can, but that doesn’t stop some of the best SSDS for gaming from producing brilliant loading times.
I don’t need to spell out to you that boosting your PS5’s storage for only $84 will save you a lot of money compared to buying an entire PS5 Pro. Personally, my PS5 runs games exactly how I want it to, and I’ve never seen it struggle to run games at 4K because console ports need to be stable in order to pass Sony’s certification process. I haven’t had my hands on the PS5 Pro to really test out its performance boosts yet, but for now, I know which upgrade route I’d recommend.
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