Makers of high-performance SSDs have wasted no time capitalizing on drives designed for gamers who are eager to pay for their experience. Sony's upgradeable SSD in PlayStation 5 certainly presents some great opportunities, too, so Addlink introduced its A95-series drives that are specifically designed and optimized for the console, joining a fast-growing list of SSDs that will work with the console (you can see the full list here).
Addlink's AddGame A95 family includes 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB M.2-2280 SSDs. The new drives use a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface to offer maximum performance for gamers. The drives are rated for up to 7400/7000 MB/s sequential read/write speeds, meaning Addlink's AddGame A95 4TB SSDs not only beat Sony's first-party Nextorage drives but are among the fastest SSDs for PlayStation 5 as well as the highest-performing M.2 drives available today.
As expected, the lower-capacity drives are a tad slower, but they're still rated for up to 7300 MB/s - 7400 MB/s read speeds, which is very high even by high-performance desktop standards.
The drives have Phison's PS5016-E16 NVMe 1.4-compliant controller paired with DRAM cache and 3D TLC NAND memory. While Addlink isn't disclosing the performance of its A95 drives in random workloads, we assume they offer hundreds of thousands or even a million random read/write IOPS, which is plenty for the PS5's workloads.
Just as Sony recommends, the AddGame A95 is equipped with an aluminum heat spreader featuring a 9.1-mm z-height to guarantee sustainable performance even under high loads.
Addlink plans to start selling its AddGame A95 SSDs for Sony's PlayStation 5 sometime in October. The drives will come with a five-year warranty.
