Product: Samsung 980 Pro with Heatsink PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD
Type: Storage (NVMe M.2 SSD)
Price: ~ $479 AUD (2TB)
Availability: Now
Link: samsung.com/au/memory-storage/nvme-ssd/980-pro-with-heatsink-2tb

If you’re one of the lucky ones to have scored a PlayStation 5 at launch, or in recent months for that matter, the question of expanding the internal storage so you can fit more games has probably come up. What to get, what capacity, what speed. And with the expansion of PlayStation Plus into an Xbox Game Pass-like subscription service on the horizon, a revamped service that’s set to offer up hundreds of playable games, the storage expansion question quickly becomes one that needs an urgent answer.

With the arrival of PCIe Gen 4 on PC and the PS5 making use of high-speed data transfers the arrival of the Samsung 980 Pro with Heatsink makes a lot of sense. Samsung is a leader in SSD storage for a reason, its range has not only been a reliable one, but at the forefront of speed, performance, availability, and pricing. Plus all of the technology and hardware and little chips that make up its memory/storage range are developed and manufactured in-house.

Here you’ve got Samsung’s top of the range consumer-oriented PCIe Gen4 M.2 SSD in the 980 Pro, with the addition of a heatsink. An important addition because it immediately makes the award-winning bit of tech something of a perfect fit for the PS5. With only 667.2 GB of usable storage out of the box, adding some expanded capacity is something that quite a large percentage of PS5 owners are looking into.

Reading and Writing 101

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Eliminating long load times is one of more unsung elements of the current generation of consoles, a truly massive leap forward compared to what was found during the PS4 generation. The cost of near instantaneous loading is pretty much, well, a cost. These sorts of speeds can’t be obtained with an external USB-based drive, with the only expansion option being to connect a secondary drive directly to the PS5’s underlying console hardware.

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"Samsung is a leader in SSD storage for a reason, its range has not only been a reliable one, but at the forefront of speed, performance, availability, and pricing."

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Thankfully Sony has put the SSD expansion slot neatly under the removable lid, so the only step that needs to be taken by consumers is choosing a drive that can hit a certain speed, maintain cool temperatures (so it doesn’t get throttled), and is of the PCIe 4.0 family.

In practice this means that only the high end Gen 4 drives are truly PS5-compatible, and with the Samsung 980 Pro being Samsung’s premium SSD for PC, the result is storage faster than that of the already fast internal PS5 storage. With an advertised read speed of up to 7,000 MB/sec, it’s theoretically capable of shaving off some time from the PS5’s internal storage loading times - race-car style.

Plug-and-Play

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As far as heatsinks go, the one found on the Samsung 980 Pro here is excellent in that its low profile makes it double as a viable option for some laptops. Devices, like the PS5, where heat management can become an issue under heavy load. One of the benefits of SSD makers creating PS5-compatible drives is that the cooling benefits translate over to PC. This means that if you were to Samsung 980 Pro with Heatsink next to the heatsink-free version you’d get a substantially cooler drive and potentially one that could last longer thanks to a max operating temperature of 70-degrees Celsius.

Specs

• Form Factor: M.2 2280
  
• Type: NVMe PCIe 4.0 NVMe
  
• Sequential Read: Up to 7,000 MB/s
  
• Sequential Write: Up to 5,100 MB/s
  
• Capacity: 2TB tested (1TB also available)
  
• Weight: 30 g

In terms of the advertised read-speed the Samsung 980 Pro with Heatsink lives up to the promise by getting pretty close to 7,000 MB/s (6,757 is what we managed) read speeds and just about spot on 5,100 MB/s write speeds. For PlayStation 5 owners the benefit is not only storage at a higher capacity than the internal drive, but faster too, and in a form-factor that runs cooler over a longer period of time.

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"For PlayStation 5 owners the benefit is not only storage at a higher capacity than the internal drive, but faster too, and in a form-factor that runs cooler over a longer period of time."

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As mentioned earlier the cost for all of this goodness is a comparatively high price (compared to the console itself) but Samsung’s 2TB offering is actually remarkably affordable compared to some of the competition. In Australia, at the time of writing, it can be picked up for $479 AUD. Effectively tripling what comes packed in the base console in addition to adding that very welcome additional storage. And with the Samsung 980 Pro being one of the best M.2 storage options for PC, it's now one of the best for PS5.