The new WD Black SN850 SSD and WD Black AN1500 SSD have been announced by Western Digital and promise “irrationally fast” speeds for gamers. What’s even more interesting, however, is that this new drive might just be a PS5-compatible SSD.
WD Black is a long-running brand of Western Digital’s hard drives and SSDs that feature a specific focus on performance. The company has been making data storage devices for nearly 40 years, and now it’s leveraging all of that experience to launch some of the fastest consumer SSDs on the market. Whether or not these new drives will work with the PS5, however, is up in the air.
Will the new WD Black SN850 SSD work with the PS5?
Although the Xbox Series X will be using a proprietary expandable storage solution, Sony has opted to allow players to put any compatible SSD into their PS5. The new WD Black SN850 SSD could work as PS5 expandable storage — its specs certainly look promising — but there is one important factor that we still do not yet know.
The WD Black SN850 SSD will be an M.2 2280 drive utilizing a PCIe 4.0 interface. It has a 7,000 MB/s read speed and a 4,100 MB/s write speed, and it will be available in 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB sizes. These meet all of the required hardware specs for a PS5-compatible SSD for expandable storage:
- PCIe Gen 4
- M.2 specification
- 2230, 2242, 2260, or 2280 size
- 5.5 GB/s speed minimum
However, Sony has yet to announce its “whitelist” of approved drives for the PS5 expandable storage slot. It’s unclear if SSDs that are not part of this whitelist will work with the PS5, or if any SSD that meets the required hardware specs can be used.
With the amount of free space on the PS5’s SSD still not confirmed by Sony, many gamers will surely be looking at expandable storage solutions for their next-gen gaming experience. You can buy the WD Black SN850 on Western Digital’s website starting at $149.99.
