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.

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.