Best PS5 SSD for 2024: Add more storage to your PlayStation 5

When vetting, testing, and recommending the best PS5s for SSDs, here are some of the most important criteria we used to choose the products that ended up on our list:

• Minimum requirements: While you don’t need specific Sony-made PS5 SSDs, there are some requirements. Alongside specific instructions on PS5 SSD installation, Sony gives us some guidelines for compatible SSD drives. You should double-check any chosen SSD for your PS5 against these requirements on your own. To summarize, here, however, it is important that you get a PCI-Express Gen4x4 M.2 NVMe SSD (note here that “Gen4x4” means you need a Gen 4.0 SSD) that reads at a recommended speed of 5,500MB/s or faster. You’ll likely want a built-in heatsink, as they are required for the unit to function. The combined size of the unit, with heatsink, should be no wider than 25mm (.98 inches) and no thicker than 11.25mm (0.44 inches).
• Storage space: While Sony also gives us recommendations on the required storage space (250GB to 8TB) we typically find that the sweet spot for the best PS5 SSDs is between 1TB and 4TB. Any lower than this, and your system will fill up with games quickly and any higher than this is just overkill. Delete your old games, as there’s nothing stopping you from downloading them again.
• Brand reputation and values: Being overly attached to a brand is a great way to miss out on a great product. That being said, you should also consider a particular brand’s reputation and experience when it comes to making SSDs and PlayStation 5 compatible SSDs. Additionally, is there customer support available to help you when problems arise? What’s the guarantee on the SSD and does it come with a warrantee? Be sure to get a PS5 SSD that you can trust.
• Real customer reviews: When you want to buy a game, the review of a like-minded individual will tell you all you need to know. But some products are made at scale and need to be tested in the same way. Here, we’re looking for highly-rated products on review platforms we trust like Amazon and Best Buy. When hundreds, or even thousands, of reviews come back positive, you know you have a winner.
• Price: When it comes to gaming, there’s always someone out to there willing to take a gamer’s money for very little extra value. Adding an image of a video game character or a few RGB lights to the exterior of a product might make a manufacturer think they can take an unsuspecting gamer for all their worth. Slapping phrases like “built for PS5” on the label and tuning their SSD as something special — despite being a standard SSD — can also inflate your PS5 SSD’s price. Choose products that have real value for the dollar and beware of inflated prices. At the same time, if you’re trying to save money, aim to purchase PS5 SSD deals over excessively cheap products that will just disappoint you in the end.

For a quick, reliable pickup, we highly recommend grabbing the Samsung 990 Pro. The 1, 2, and 4TB versions are all amongst the best PS5 SSDs for their respective sizes, built with quality speeds and a reliable heatsink. If you’re particularly indecisive, we most recommend the 2TB version, as that is a comfortable medium in terms of size and it is consider the best of the best of the three sizes, maximizing the cost-to-value ratio in your favor.

In addition to the main list of five products we chose, we also selected three runner-up options that we'll share here:

• ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade — The ADATA is incredibly popular and can be found for a somewhat cheaper price than similar products, but didn’t quite have the premium quality we were looking for in the categories we wanted to slot it into.
• WD Black SN850 and WD Black SN850X — There could really be a whole series about the best PS5 SSDs from WD Black, as they are so popular and well made. Ultimately, for this article we stuck to the WD Black SN850P, though you should absolutely check out these two alternatives in the SN850 series if you want a wider selection and are a fan of the brand.
• Addlink S95 — Addlink’s biggest storage version of the S95 nearly won out as the best PS5 SSD in the 8TB category due to its fast speeds and lower pricing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a heatsink. In the end, paying a little more for an equipped heatsink and only slightly slower speeds seemed fine for the average buyer.

A 2TB SSD should be enough for most PS5 gamers. At this level of storage, you should be able to see your storage limit coming way ahead of time, giving you ample time to delete beaten or unwanted games. Our recommendation is to get an SSD between 2TB and 4TB.

Both 2TB and 4TB SSDs for PS5 are okay. A typical gamer will be happy with a 2TB SSD, but gamers that like giant open-world games with complex designs may want a 4TB SSD. With all of the space on the 1TB PS5 already, you likely won’t need much more.

Yes, the PS5 supports 8TB SSDs, however that will likely be excessive most gamers. As you can delete and redownload games later, there is no real reason to have an SSD this large. Epic space game Starfield — one of those games taking up too much space — takes up about 125GB of space on your SSD. Though a Starfield review might warn you not to, you could fit 64 copies of the game on an 8TB SSD. You really just don’t need to.

A PS5 only has one SSD slot for an external SSD. It is located by placing the PS5 on its side with the PlayStation logo face down and removing the console’s side. You can put any of the best PS4 SSDs into the slot following Sony’s M.2 SSD Installation guide.

Over the years, Digital Trends has learned to review a wide variety of technical hardware. We have specific guidelines for how we test products, give out ratings, and assign awards. For many categories of product, we have specific guidelines in place to ensure that every aspect of the product that a consumer might be interested in is covered. For example, when we test laptops, we have three different methods of testing the battery life, including a test with continuous video playing. The goal is a precision system that covers all of the bases and gives an adequate point of comparison for other products released in a similar timeframe, as well as an anchor point to look back to when the next gen is released.

Some products, on the other hand, we tend to test less often. As covered in our assessment of how we test PC components and hardware, which include odds and ends from time to time, we typically cover things like storage and SSDs less. That isn’t to say that we haven’t, but that the format is less set in stone when we do. For the SSDs we have reviewed, we focused on the quality of the build, total storage supplied, speed, read/write performance, and quality to price ratio, among any other product-specific quirks.

For SSDs that have not been directly tested through rigorous in-house protocols, the same principles apply here for us as they do in our SSD buying guide where, unsurprisingly the key factors of type, storage, durability, read/write speeds, and price once again reigned supreme. Additionally, our commerce writing team has thousands of hours assessing manufacturer claims, investigating the difference between product fact and product fiction, and “translating” product details into plain language.