Best PS5 SSDs in 2023

The best PS5 compatible solid state drives and external storage for the Sony console.

The PlayStation 5 is an impressive machine, capable of playing the latest games at 120Hz in 4K thanks to the AMD Radeon RDNA 2-based graphics engine inside. You also get an 825GB internal SSD with read speeds of around 5500MB/s, although the actual usage you get in that SSD is around 667GB.

The PS5 is the first PlayStation with an internal NVMe SSD slot, which means you can increase the console's storage space with a PS5 compatible SSD. Whilst there are no official drives for the PS5, Sony's recommended specs state it needs to be a NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD with a sequential read speed of 5500MB/s or faster. A heatsink is also required, with a combined drive and heatsink measurement of 11.25mm (0.442") or shorter. Fortunately, there are lots of standard PC SSDs on the market that'll do the job, and they have come down a lot in price. Some of the fastest solid state drives now cost less than $50/£50 or 2TB for under $100/£100.

Down below we've picked out some of the best NVMe SSDs to upgrade your PS5 storage, as well as a couple of external SSDs that are great if you need to transport your games. While we haven't tested all of these ourselves, we have used recommendations from our experts at Digital Foundry - who have tested them all - as well as seeing what the most popular drives are at US and UK retailers.

The WD_Black SN850x is the best SSD to upgrade your PS5's storage right now. It's only bested speed-wise by the Samsung 990 Pro below, but it can be picked up for around $15/£15 less most of the time which just gives it the edge overall.

The 7,300 MB/s sequential speeds are excellent, allowing for fast file transfer times, and the 800K IOPS random speeds are great at this price point and will have your games loading quickly and running smoothly no matter what refresh rate or resolution you're playing on.

The Crucial P5 Plus is still the most popular NVMe SSD to upgrade the PS5 despite newer drives outperforming it recently. This is mainly due to the fact that it's cheaper than the extreme drives like the SN850x and 990 pro, and tends to go on sale more often with larger discounts.

Despite the smaller price and older age, the P5 Plus is still an excellent performer with up to 6600MB/s sequential speeds and 630K IOPS random speeds, and is a really durable drive that once you put it inside your PS5, you won't need to worry about for a long time.

The Samsung 990 Pro is the fastest SSD around right now, with unbeatable sequential speeds of 7,450/6,900 MB/s for reads and writes respectively and 1200K(!) IOPS for random speeds. Honestly, this SSD is overkill for the PS5, as most new PS5 games won't demand that level of speed, but if you want to have the absolute best in your console, then this is the drive to get.

The Lexar NM790 is one of the cheapest NVMe SSDs that is compatible with the PS5 right now, but don't let the low price make you think it's a downgrade compared to the PS5's internal SSD - quite the opposite in fact. The NM790 has impressive speeds of 7400MB/s sequential reads, and 1000K IOPS random speeds.

The reason for the lower price than some of the above SSDs is due to the Lexar NM790 not having its own heatsink attached to it, like the drives above do. However, Lexar says that the drive is compatible with the PS5 out of the box and reviews and tests appear to back that up.

You won't be able to play the latest games directly from an external SSD on the PS5, but you can play PS4 games directly from them instead. External SSDs are also great to keep games stored 'cold' on, so you can just transfer them over to your console when you want to play them or if you want to transfer them between consoles quickly.

The WD_Black P40 has excellent read and write speeds of up to 2000MB/s, so when you are transferring files to and from the SSD to your PS5 it won't take very long. It can fit in your pocket and can survive a few drops and bumps, and looks good plugged into your console thanks to the RGB strip on the underside of the case.

That's all for now, but we'll continue to update this page when new drives come out and when the drives in the article go on sale, so make sure you follow the Deals topic here on VG247 using the tags below to stay up-to-date. We'll also post any time these SSDs go on sale over on the Jelly Deals X account (I'm still calling it Twitter), so drop us a follow there too.