Sony has developed a surprisingly powerful aftermarket SSD for the PS5, but it comes through its Nextorage subsidiary. The SSD comes hot on the heels of the official support for third-party SSD upgrades on the PS5, released only two days ago. Multiple companies have already released SSD drop-in upgrade products either adapted or specifically designed for the current-gen crop of consoles, but the Nextorage PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD promises stand-out performance.
The "NEM-PA" series of SSDs will be available in both 1TB and 2TB capacities, and performance ratings are top-notch. Nextorage rates the 2TB SSD at up to 7,300/6,900 MB/s of sequential read/write throughput, while random read and write performance reaches 1 million IOPS. Longevity-wise, the NEM-PA 2TB is rated for 1,400 TBW, and there's a total of 2GB of DDR4 RAM for caching purposes.
| 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 1TB version offers slightly more muted performance, as is usual in SSD designs: We're looking at 7,300/6,000 MB/s of sequential read/write throughput, while random read speed is rated at 750,000 IOPS. Random write performance sustains the same 1 million IOPS as the 2TB version. Longevity-wise, the NEM-PA 1TB is rated for 700 TBW.
Both capacities ship with an aluminum heatsink that's sure to pass Sony's requirements for drop-in upgrades to the PS5's integrated SSD. It's slightly odd that Sony elected to use the Nextorage brand for this product instead of marketing it under its own brand, which features a much more impactful and recognizable name than Nextorage.
Unfortunately, we don't yet have pricing or availability information for the new Nextorage SSDs, but we'll update as it becomes available. Meanwhile, if you're looking into a storage upgrade for your PS5, make sure to take a look at our PS5 SSDs list to help with your hunt for extra performance and capacity.
