"Expandability of our SSD is going to be quite important, flash is costly and you may very well want to add storage to whatever we put in the console. Now the kind of storage you need depends on how you're going to use it. If you have an extensive PlayStation 4 library and you'd like to take advantage of backwards compatibility to play those games on PlayStation 5, then a large external hard drive is ideal.
You can leave your games on the hard drive and play them directly from there, thus saving the pricier SSD storage for your PlayStation 5 titles. Or you can copy your active PlayStation 4 titles to the SSD if your purpose in adding more storage is to play PlayStation 5 titles though ideally you would add to your SSD storage. We will be supporting certain m2 SSDs these are internal drives that you can get on the open market and install in a bay in the PlayStation 5.
As for which ones we support, and when I'll get to that in a moment, they connect through the custom I/O unit just like our SSD does so they can take full advantage of the decompression I/O coprocessors and all the other features I was talking about. Here's the catch though, that commercial drive has to be at least as fast as ours games that rely on the speed of our SSD need to work flawlessly. When I gave the Wired interview last year I said that the PlayStation 5 SSD was faster than anything available on PC at the time. Commercial m2 drives used PCIE 3.0 and four lanes of that cap out at 3.5 gigabytes a second. In other words no PCIE 3.0 drive can hit the required spec m2 drives with PCIE 4.0.
Now out in the market we're getting in samples and seeing four or five gigabytes a second from them. By year's end I expect there will be drives that saturate PCIE 4.0 and support seven gigabytes a second. Having said that, we are comparing apples and oranges though because that commercial m2 drive will have its own architecture its own flash controller and so on. For example the nvme specification lays out a priority scheme for requests that the m2 drives can use and that scheme is pretty nice but it only has two true priority levels our drive supports six. We can hook up a drive with only two priority levels definitely but our custom IO unit has to arbitrate the extra priorities rather than the m2 drives flash controller and so the m2 drive needs a little extra speed to take care of issues arising from the different approach. That commercial drive also needs to physically fit inside of the bay we created in PlayStation 5.
For m2 drives, unlike internal hard drives, there's unfortunately no standard for the height of an m2 Drive and some m2 drives have giant heat sinks. In fact some of them even have their own fans right now. We're getting some drive samples and benchmarking them in various ways. When games hit in beta, as they get ready for the PlayStation 5 launch at year-end, we'll also be doing some compatibility testing to make sure that the architecture of particular m2 drives isn't too foreign for the games to handle. Once we've done that compatibility testing we should be able to start letting you know which drives will physically fit and which drive samples have benchmark appropriately high in our testing. It would be great if that happened by launch but it's likely to be a bit past it so please hold off on getting that m2 drive until you hear from us."
