PlayStation 5 Set to Use Samsung SSDs

A presentation given by Samsung early this week has prompted speculation that Sony has chosen Samsung as its storage medium partner, with the PlayStation 5 looking to move from traditional spinning disks to much faster solid state drives.

Samsung detailed the NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) solution they are currently working on, showing that a standard hard drive would currently take 50 seconds for the system to boot, whereas a typical SSD takes 29 seconds, and an optimised NVMe drive a lot less. The graph they showed, included below with the original Tweet from Daniel Ahmad (Senior Analyst at Niko Partners), doesn't tell us exactly how much this optimised NVMe drive will decrease load times though, but we can take good estimates from PCs using these today.

Looks like PS5 and other next gen consoles could be using Samsung SSD's for fast game loading according to a presentation from Samsung in Tokyo today. https://t.co/vZMGkiDGhf pic.twitter.com/ItDsYqWOEG

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) November 25, 2019

As you can see above, a DualShock controller is included to the right of the graph; Samsung never name-dropped the PlayStation 5, but we can infer that this is the platform they are working on. It is likely that they will also be working alongside Microsoft for Project Scarlett, too.

This will come as music to the ears of all gamers excited for the PlayStation 5, with one major pain point for many being the relative slowness of loading times in some games, with others suffering from asset pop-in. However, spinning disks are much cheaper compared to NVMe drives (although they are much cheaper now than they were at the time of the PlayStation 4 launch, six years ago), so it will be interesting to see how much storage will be provided come launch.

In case you missed it, some eagle eyes spotted patents filed for the next generation DualShock controller earlier this month. As expected, it's hardly a huge change.

Sony is expected to release the PlayStation 5 close to Christmas 2020.