I love my mates. Truly, I do. The boys, the lads, the chads. There through the hard times and the good alike, there’s few things as joyous as settling in with a good bunch of folks to shoot the shit and play some games. Across my little band, tastes vary wildly, though. There’s the guy who can’t stop insisting Sea of Thieves is fun, actually. The dude who shows up once a month to rally us back into Helldivers II or dabble in some stray live-service they’ve noticed between the newborn and the daily grind. And of course, the ongoing co-op campaign for Baldur’s Gate III. After these, I’m still trying to cram my games into the now creaking PlayStation 5 storage, an increasingly problematic balancing act as game file sizes balloon and the boys, bless ’em, all want different things.
It’s unsurprising, then, that the expandable storage market has ballooned in the current console generation. The already popular Western Digital (WD) SN850 range has proven to be a gamer mainstay, and now PlayStation has teamed up with the manufacturer for the WD_Black SN850P NVMe SSD, a range of 1-4TB drives that sport a sleek new aesthetic and PS5-compatible heatsink. After having one of these nestled in my console for a while now, I can’t quite imagine life without one, though its solid performance and ease of use isn’t without some caveats.
The SN850P is a sleek and modern looking unit
As someone who considers themselves tech literate but a hardware novice, the installation process of the SN850P was remarkably smooth. After pushing through the innate terror of assuming you’re about to snap your PS5 plate in half by removing it (the application of pressure to that one corner always makes me feel like I’m doing it wrong), the SN850P finds itself right at home in the console’s M.2 storage slot. Removing the cover plate, you’ll simply need to unscrew the M.2 screw and stand-off piece before slotting the SN850P in. A light click will indicate a successful connection, and then you can use the M.2 pieces to secure the drive in place. It’s effectively foolproof, the process made even easier by the dozens of guides you can find from both official and unofficial YouTube pages.
Upon booting up the PS5 for the first time post-installation of the SN850P, you’ll be prompted to format the drive before you can begin the great game dump in earnest. The SN850P comes in a range of sizes (we reviewed the 1TB model), but no matter your choice, it’ll sport a heat-sync and clean form factor. Advertising speeds of 7,300 MB/s, the actual performance of the unit is a little more complicated to track. Clocking in around 6,300 MB/s once in use, the disparity between expectations and reality in raw performance is disappointing, but moment-to-moment use is still a fairly speedy and comfortable experience. Moving games from the base system storage to the SN850P is snappy, with even larger files, like Baldur’s Gate III’s whopping 122GB, transferring in less than a minute. Selecting multiple titles to move at once does slow things down a little, but not noticeably so for daily use.
Installation is easy (image supplied by manufacturer)
Comparing load time and performance across the two different drives proved again how seamlessly the SN850P will slot into your gaming routine. Tested across multiple games of varying complexity, load times were comparable to the PS5’s SSD, occasionally proving a little faster even. Single-player indie to AAA live-service title, reading a game from the expanded drive didn’t result in any noticeable performance dips either, meaning I could comfortably park those lad games in the SN850P and stop worrying about how to fit everything onto the console. In that sense, the SN850P hit the mission accomplished and then some.
The caveat, then, is the price of entry. The unit itself is a sleek reworking of WD’s earlier models, ditching the LED light and embracing an aesthetically pleasing, sturdy heatsink frame, smooth black finish, and a little officially licensed PlayStation logo for good measure. It feels good in the hand, a metal casing a nice finishing touch, and while none of this truly matters once it’s nestled inside the console, a premium price should be matched by a premium form factor. Sitting on shelves at $279 for the 1TB model (and up to $829 for 4TB), it is a pricey bit of kit, as the licensing deal with Sony has seemingly driven the cost up over WD’s SN850X range. With directly comparable features and at roughly $100 less per model, consumers who are looking to save some coin would be better served grabbing the logo-less unit.
Final Thoughts
The ability to pop the back off the PS5 and slap in a solution to your modern gaming storage problems is worth its weight in gold, something Western Digital seems a little too keenly aware of. At a glance, the official PlayStation licensing makes the SN850P seemingly the best option, assured by the box that it’ll work with your console, but this is an exorbitantly priced bit of pseudo-branded-comfort. It’s a solid drive with solid performance, but if you and the boys need to expand your console’s storage, there are more accessible options out there.
Review unit supplied by manufacturer
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