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Sony's Nextorage Launches PlayStation 5 SSDs in the U.S.
When Sony's Nextorage subsidiary announced its NEM-PA SSDs for PlayStation 5 console last September, it generated much interest from the console crowd as this was essentially a first-party upgrade. Surprisingly, Nextorage decided not to sell its NEM-PA drives in the U.S. last year. However, the company changed its mind and said recently that NEM-PA SSDs for PlayStation 5 consoles would arrive in the U.S. at Amazon.com starting this month.
Typically, first-party upgrades offer mediocre performance, but this is certainly not the case with the Nextorage NEM-PA SSDs that are rated for up 7,300 MB/s sequential read speed, up to 6,900 MB/s sequential write speed, and up to 1 million random read/write IOPS. From a performance point of view, we are dealing with one of the best SSDs available today.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
PS5-Compatible Sony SSD
Sequential Read/Write
Random Read/Write
Endurance
2TB Nextorage NEM-PA
7,300 / 6,900 MB/s
1,000,000 / 1,000,000 IOPS
1,400 TBW
1TB Nextorage NEM-PA
7,300 / 6,000 MB/s
750,000 / 1,000,000 IOPS
700 TBW
The SSDs are based on an unknown NVMe 1.4-compliant controller featuring eight 1200 MT/s NAND channels, a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, an advanced LDPC-based error correction algorithm, SLC caching, and other modern capabilities.
Capacity and endurance-wise, the NEM-PA family includes two drives featuring 1TB and 2TB capacities. They are rated for 700 terabytes written (TBW) and 1400 TBW over a five-year period, which equals around 0.38 drive writes per day (DWPD) and represents a fairly good endurance.
All Nextorage NEM-PA SSDs come with a compact aluminum heat spreader to ensure consistent performance under high loads.
It is somewhat surprising that Nextorage didn't announce MSRPs of its NEM-PA drives for PlayStation 5. However, keeping in mind that there are plenty of PS5-compatible SSDs on the market, we would not expect Nextorage to charge a huge premium for its drives due to healthy competition. Nevertheless, it will still be interesting to see how much the company wants for these products.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
Only upto 2TB? bleh. I mean sure 2TB is manageble but let's be real, 4TB is the sweet spot.
Also, will these work on PC motherboards or are they specifically only for PS5?
Per the press release:
Optimized cooling structureHigh performance and stability last thanks to the optimized heat dissipation design -- the NEM-PA series comes with an aluminium heatsink coated with highly thermally radioactive black alumite, which suppresses thermal throttling (speed limit activation to prevent thermal runaway). The heatsink cannot be disassembled. When users mount this product on a desktop computer, make sure there is enough space for the M.2 SSD to be installed. This drive cannot be used for laptop computers.
The cheapest 4TB PCIe 4.0 NVME drive I could find costs more than the disc version PS5.
Sure but again let's be real...2TB is like still not enough these days and the more TB you get, the more faster the NVMe will be.
Alvar Miles Udell said:
Per the press release:
Optimized cooling structureHigh performance and stability last thanks to the optimized heat dissipation design -- the NEM-PA series comes with an aluminium heatsink coated with highly thermally radioactive black alumite, which suppresses thermal throttling (speed limit activation to prevent thermal runaway). The heatsink cannot be disassembled. When users mount this product on a desktop computer, make sure there is enough space for the M.2 SSD to be installed. This drive cannot be used for laptop computers.
Strange that it will only work on desktops but not on laptops...
At 2TB you can fit 10 games with ease at the same time...Do you play 10 games at once? And you can always offload some to an external HDD if you want to swap out.
2TB is still plenty these days unless you're working with 4k video files.
Like I said in my post, 2TB is manageable right now but soon you will be inclined to get a 4TB at some point. Games are getting more complicated and require more storage especially the AAA ones at that. Elden ring itself needs 60GB at that.
I clearly remember excitedly driving home after purchasing a 200MB hard drive for a steal of $500. "I'll NEVER need another drive for the rest of my life! This thing is CAVERNOUS!!"
