Something to look forward to: There have been two kinds of waiting for Sony’s PlayStation 5. The first is getting your hands on one without paying the scalper fee and the second is being able to increase the console’s internal storage by slotting an m.2 drive in the expansion bay. For those in the latter club, the wait will soon be over as Sony reportedly plans to enable this functionality via a firmware update due out this summer.
Unlike Microsoft and its proprietary storage expansion on the Series X|S, Sony went the third-party route with the PlayStation 5 that’ll let players choose from a variety of NVMe options as long as they’ve been certified for use.
While several m.2 SSDs currently available in the market would likely satisfy Sony’s compatibility criteria, the actual hardware support will be enabled in the summer via a firmware update, reports Bloomberg. Being able to expand upon the console’s 667GB of usable storage space would indeed be among the first upgrades that many gamers would be looking forward to.
The upcoming firmware will also allow the PS5 cooling fans to spin at higher RPMs. While this capability has already been known to exist, Sony will likely boost fan speeds to address thermals once a third-party SSD comes into play.
It’s only a matter of a few months until PS5 users will finally be able to load their massive game libraries. This wait, however, is a small inconvenience in the face of game delays, scalpers, and production constraints that’ll likely be sticking around for longer.