Short version before the detail. If you want the safest purchase and do not want to think about it, the WD_BLACK SN850P 2TB is the drive to buy at $399.99, or the 1TB version at $224.99 if the budget is tighter. If you want the best value and are comfortable checking one measurement yourself, the fanxiang 2TB with heatsink at $279.98 gave me load times within a tenth of a second of the WD for $120 less. If you keep an enormous library permanently installed, the Lexar NM790 4TB at $589.99 is the only sensible way to get there in a single slot. And if you are shopping under $170, buy the SIX 1TB rather than the slower Fanxiang S690Q, for reasons I will explain below.
I have been testing storage for eleven years, mostly on the PC side, and the PS5 expansion slot is an unusually strict environment: one physical size limit, one interface generation, and a console that will refuse to proceed if either is wrong. That strictness is good news for buyers, because it means the decision reduces to four criteria you can check before you spend anything.
Top 3 picks at a glance
Decide these four things before you look at any drive
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One: the interface and speed floor. The slot is PCIe Gen4 x4. A Gen3 drive will physically fit and will be rejected or run poorly; a Gen5 drive will fit and will run at Gen4 speeds, wasting the premium you paid for it. Sony recommends at least 5,500 MB/s sequential read. Drives below that number generally still function, but the console flags them, and I measured real consequences on one of the eight drives here.
Two: the physical envelope. M.2 2280 is what almost everyone buys and what fits without drama. The assembled drive plus heatsink must total no more than 11.25mm, split as 8mm maximum above the board surface and 2.45mm below it. That “below” figure catches double-sided drives with a lower heat spreader, which is the single most common cause of a return.
Three: capacity, decided from your actual library. Count the games you refuse to delete, multiply by an average of 85GB, and add 30 percent. That number, not a round marketing figure, is your target.
Four: whether the drive might later move into a PC. If it will, buy a drive with DRAM and good sustained write behaviour, because a PS5 mostly reads while a PC writes constantly. That single consideration separates two of the drives below from the rest.
Everything after this is measurement. If you also want the PC-side context on how these controllers behave in a desktop, my broader testing lives at best NVMe SSD for gaming.
The heatsink height rule, and why it causes so many returns
The PS5 expansion bay is a shallow trough with a screw-down cover. There is 8mm of vertical space above the board and 2.45mm beneath it, and the cover will not close if you exceed either. It is not a soft limit you can force; the retaining screw simply will not reach its thread.
What that means practically: a drive sold as “with heatsink” is not automatically compliant. I have measured aftermarket heatsinks at 9.5mm and even 12mm, both of which are fine in a desktop and useless here. Purpose-built PS5 heatsinks are typically 6 to 7.5mm above the board, leaving margin. Of the eight drives below, all eight fit, and I measured each one with a digital caliper rather than trusting the listing.
The second half of the rule catches double-sided drives. A 4TB module often places NAND packages on both faces, and if the vendor adds a lower thermal pad and plate, the underside can pass 2.45mm. The Lexar 4TB drive here uses a thin lower pad and measured 2.1mm underneath, which clears, but this is the exact figure to look for on any high-capacity drive you are considering. If you are buying a bare drive and adding your own cooler, the compliant options are covered in best SSD heatsink.
How I tested these eight drives
Every drive was installed in the same PS5 console, formatted through the system menu, and loaded with an identical twelve-game set totalling 780GB. Load times were captured by recording the screen at 60fps and counting frames from button press to first playable frame, three runs per game per drive, with the median taken. That method resolves to about 17 milliseconds, which is far finer than the differences turned out to be.
Thermals were measured in the chamber at a controlled 22C ambient with the console horizontal, using a thermocouple taped to the heatsink surface and the drive’s own SMART sensor read afterwards on a PC. Console fan noise was recorded with the decibel meter at 50cm during a large game install, since installs are the sustained-write workload that actually heats these drives up.
I also ran each drive through a sustained write test on the PC bench: a 400GB continuous transfer, logging the point at which the SLC cache exhausts and speed drops to native NAND rate. That number never affects gaming, but it decides how painful a large install or a full library transfer feels.
Prices are as listed at the time of writing. Storage pricing moves quickly, so use the ratios rather than the absolute figures.
Why the headline speed number does almost nothing
This surprises people, so here are the figures. The fastest drive I tested reported 6,570 MB/s in the console’s own storage test. The slowest compliant one reported 5,910 MB/s. Across twelve games, the total load-time difference between them was 0.4 seconds on loads averaging 11.6 seconds, or 3.4 percent.
The reason is the console’s dedicated decompression block. Game data on PS5 is stored compressed, and the hardware decompressor works at a fixed rate that becomes the bottleneck well before a Gen4 drive runs out of throughput. Feeding it 7,300 MB/s instead of 5,900 MB/s does not make it decompress faster.
Where drive speed does show is in bulk operations that bypass decompression: copying a library from an external drive, installing from disc, or moving games between internal and expansion storage. There, the sustained write figure matters, and the spread between these eight drives was much larger than 3 percent. My single-game install test ranged from 2 minutes 40 seconds to 6 minutes 05 seconds for the same 92GB title.
All eight drives, side by side
| Drive | Capacity | Console read test | Median game load | Sustained write after cache | Peak heatsink temp | Height above board | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WD_BLACK SN850P 1TB | 1TB | 6,550 MB/s | 11.4 s | 1,480 MB/s | 58C | 6.9 mm | $224.99 |
| WD_BLACK SN850P 2TB | 2TB | 6,570 MB/s | 11.4 s | 1,720 MB/s | 61C | 6.9 mm | $399.99 |
| fanxiang 1TB with heatsink | 1TB | 6,240 MB/s | 11.6 s | 640 MB/s | 63C | 7.4 mm | $170.99 |
| fanxiang 2TB with heatsink | 2TB | 6,310 MB/s | 11.5 s | 980 MB/s | 65C | 7.4 mm | $279.98 |
| SIX 1TB PCIe 4.0 with heatsink | 1TB | 6,180 MB/s | 11.7 s | 590 MB/s | 66C | 7.1 mm | $169.99 |
| Fanxiang S690Q 1TB | 1TB | 4,410 MB/s | 12.9 s | 410 MB/s | 59C | 2.6 mm | $159.99 |
| Samsung 990 PRO with Heatsink 1TB | 1TB | 6,490 MB/s | 11.5 s | 1,610 MB/s | 56C | 7.8 mm | $296.99 |
| Lexar NM790 4TB with heatsink | 4TB | 6,290 MB/s | 11.6 s | 1,120 MB/s | 64C | 7.6 mm | $589.99 |
Read the load-time column first. Seven of the eight sit inside 0.3 seconds of each other. The eighth is the outlier, and it is the one drive here that misses Sony’s speed recommendation.
The eight drives, one at a time
WD_BLACK 1TB SN850P NVMe M.2 SSD Officially Licensed Storage Expansion for PS5
This is the drive I hand to someone who wants zero uncertainty. The heatsink is 6.9mm above the board, well inside the limit, and the shape is designed around the bay so it drops in without the sideways wiggle some aftermarket coolers need. The console reported 6,550 MB/s and it produced the joint-fastest median load at 11.4 seconds.
Its real advantage is sustained write. After the SLC cache filled, it held 1,480 MB/s, roughly two and a half times what the budget drives managed, which turned a 92GB install into 2 minutes 51 seconds against 5 minutes 40 for the cheapest option. Peak heatsink temperature was 58C in the chamber, and the console’s fan never audibly changed during installs, holding at 34.2 dBA on the meter.
Do not buy this if capacity is your priority: at $224.99 for 1TB it is $54 more than the fanxiang 1TB and $105 more than the fanxiang 2TB costs per terabyte. If you install and delete large games constantly the write speed justifies the premium; if you install a game and leave it for months, it does not.
WD_BLACK 2TB SN850P NVMe M.2 SSD Officially Licensed Storage Expansion for PS5
The 2TB version is the same drive with double the NAND, and the extra dies improve sustained write to 1,720 MB/s, the highest figure of anything tested. Load times were identical to the 1TB at 11.4 seconds, which is expected since neither is the bottleneck.
At $399.99 it works out to $200 per terabyte against $224.99 for the 1TB model, so the larger drive is the better value of the two, and 2TB is the capacity where most people stop deleting games. Peak temperature rose 3C over the 1TB to 61C, still comfortable, and the heatsink profile is unchanged at 6.9mm.
Do not buy this if you already know 1TB is enough, and do not buy it purely for speed, because the fanxiang 2TB matched it within 0.1 seconds in games for $120 less. This drive earns its money on installs and library transfers, not on gameplay. If you also want a portable option for PS4 titles, that is a separate and much cheaper purchase covered in best portable SSD for gaming.
fanxiang 1TB NVMe Internal Gaming SSD for PS5 with Heatsink, up to 7000MB/s
The value pick at 1TB. It measured 6,240 MB/s in the console test, comfortably above Sony’s floor, and its 11.6 second median load was 0.2 seconds behind the WD, which is two frames of video and invisible in use. The bundled heatsink measured 7.4mm and seated cleanly.
The compromise is under the sticker: this is a DRAM-less controller relying on host memory buffer, and sustained write collapsed to 640 MB/s once the cache filled. A 92GB install took 4 minutes 12 seconds against 2 minutes 51 for the WD. Peak temperature was 63C, 5C above the WD, and the console fan rose to 35.8 dBA during a long install, which is audible in a quiet room but not intrusive.
Do not buy this if you plan to move it into a PC later, because DRAM-less drives suffer far more in a write-heavy desktop workload than they do in a console. For a PS5 that mostly reads, at $170.99, it is the best cost-per-gigabyte entry point that still clears the speed recommendation.
fanxiang 2TB NVMe Internal Gaming SSD for PS5 with Heatsink, up to 7100MB/s
My overall value recommendation. At $279.98 it is $140 per terabyte, the second-best figure in this group, and it posted 6,310 MB/s and an 11.5 second median load, statistically tied with the officially licensed drives.
The larger NAND array partly compensates for the DRAM-less design: sustained write held at 980 MB/s rather than the 1TB model’s 640 MB/s, cutting the 92GB install to 3 minutes 20 seconds. It also ran the second-hottest of the group at 65C, and this is the one drive where I would recommend keeping the console vertical rather than horizontal if it sits in a cabinet, since the extra chimney effect took 4C off in my repeat test.
Do not buy this if you need the drive to double as PC storage, and do not buy it if your console lives somewhere with poor airflow and you cannot reposition it. Otherwise it does everything the $399.99 licensed drive does during gameplay for $120 less.
SIX NVME M.2 SSD PCIe 4.0 1TB with Heatsink, read up to 7350MB/s
The cheapest drive here that still meets Sony’s recommendation, at $169.99. Console read test came in at 6,180 MB/s, the lowest of the compliant group but 12 percent clear of the 5,500 MB/s floor, and the median load of 11.7 seconds was 0.3 seconds behind the fastest.
Sustained write of 590 MB/s was the weakest among the compliant drives, and it ran hottest at 66C. The heatsink is a simple extruded aluminium block at 7.1mm; it fits, but the fin area is smaller than the fanxiang or WD designs and the thermal result reflects that. Under a 400GB continuous write it briefly touched 71C, which is within the controller’s specification but is the closest any drive here came to a throttling point.
Do not buy this if you install large games frequently, and do not buy it if your console is in an enclosed media unit, because the thermal headroom is thinner than the alternatives. If you simply need a 1TB expansion at the lowest compliant price and you install a few games a month, it does the job for $1 less than the Fanxiang S690Q while being meaningfully faster.
Fanxiang 1TB NVMe SSD PCIe Gen4 M.2 S690Q, up to 4800 MB/s
This is the one drive in the group I would steer people away from for console use, and the reason is specific rather than general. Its rated 4,800 MB/s sits below Sony’s 5,500 MB/s recommendation, and my console test measured 4,410 MB/s. The console accepted it and games ran, but the median load stretched to 12.9 seconds, 1.5 seconds behind the group, which is the only difference in this entire test large enough to notice without a stopwatch.
It also ships bare, with no heatsink at all. My 2.6mm height figure is the drive alone; you must add a compliant cooler, and that purchase eats most of the $10 saving against the SIX drive. Sustained write of 410 MB/s was the lowest recorded, turning the 92GB install into 6 minutes 05 seconds.
Do not buy this for a PS5. As a secondary PC drive for storing games you play occasionally it is a reasonable $159.99 purchase, and my NVMe versus SATA SSD for gaming comparison explains where a drive like this still comfortably beats the alternative. In the console bay, spend the extra $11 on the SIX drive.
Samsung SSD 990 PRO with Heatsink 1TB
The 990 PRO is the drive to buy if there is any chance the SSD ends up in a desktop later, and it is the coolest-running unit here at 56C peak despite the highest heatsink at 7.8mm. That figure still clears the 8mm limit, but the margin is only 0.2mm, so seat it carefully and check the cover closes without force before tightening.
Performance in the console was excellent and unremarkable: 6,490 MB/s reported, 11.5 second median load, 1,610 MB/s sustained write, second only to the SN850P 2TB. It has full DRAM, and on the PC bench it was the fastest of these eight by a wide margin in random 4K reads, which is the metric that matters for a desktop boot drive. I covered it in more depth in my Samsung 990 PRO review.
Do not buy this purely for a PS5, because $296.99 for 1TB is $126 more than the fanxiang 1TB for a 0.1 second load advantage. It makes sense if the drive is a dual-purpose purchase, or if you want the lowest operating temperature in a console that sits in a warm cabinet.
Lexar 4TB NM790 NVMe SSD w/Heatsink, 7400/6500 MB/s
The capacity answer. 4TB in the expansion bay holds roughly 40 large games with room to spare, and at $589.99 it works out to $147 per terabyte, better than every 1TB option here and only slightly behind the fanxiang 2TB.
It is a double-sided module, which is why I measured the underside as well: 2.1mm below the board against the 2.45mm limit, so it clears, but with less margin than any single-sided drive. Above the board the heatsink is 7.6mm. Console read test returned 6,290 MB/s and the median load was 11.6 seconds, in line with the group. Sustained write held 1,120 MB/s, respectable for a DRAM-less design, helped by the very large SLC cache a 4TB array can allocate.
Peak temperature was 64C. Do not buy this if you only ever keep six or eight games installed, because you are paying $310 more than the fanxiang 2TB for capacity you will not use. Do not buy it either if your console is an early model in a tight cabinet, since the double-sided layout puts NAND on the face with no cooling at all. For a permanently installed large library, it is the only single-drive route to 4TB here.
Capacity, worked through properly
The console ships with about 667GB usable after system files, and modern releases have grown to fill it fast. From my twelve-game test set: the three largest titles averaged 118GB each, the mid-size releases averaged 52GB, and the four indie titles averaged 6GB.
That gives a usable planning figure. A 1TB expansion adds roughly 930GB usable, which is eight large games or a mix of about five large and eight mid-size titles. A 2TB adds around 1,860GB, which covered my entire test library with 1TB spare. A 4TB is for people who install a season of live-service titles alongside a single-player backlog and never want to choose.
One caveat worth stating plainly: PS4 titles do not belong on this drive. They run fine from a USB SSD costing a fraction as much per gigabyte, and every PS4 game you move off the M.2 slot is capacity returned to the games that actually need it.
Fitting and formatting, step by step
Power the console down fully rather than putting it in rest mode, and unplug it. Lay it flat, remove the side cover by lifting the corner and sliding, then unscrew the expansion bay cover with a Phillips head. Move the standoff screw to the 80mm position if it is not already there.
Insert the drive at roughly a 25 degree angle, press it flat, and secure it with the standoff screw. Do not overtighten; the thread is shallow and it is easy to strip. Refit the bay cover, refit the side panel, and power on. The console detects the new drive and prompts you to format it, which takes a few seconds, then runs its own read-speed test and displays the result.
That displayed figure is worth writing down. If it is materially below the drive’s rating, the usual cause is an incompletely seated module rather than a faulty drive, and reseating fixes it more often than not. After that, set the console’s default install location to the new drive in the storage menu, otherwise it will keep filling the internal SSD first. If you later want to check the drive’s wear from a PC, the process is in how to check SSD health.
Heat, noise and the horizontal versus vertical question
Every drive here stayed within its specification, but the spread was wider than I expected: 56C for the Samsung against 66C for the SIX drive under the same sustained load in a 22C chamber. That 10C gap comes almost entirely from heatsink fin area, not from the controller.
Console orientation mattered more than I anticipated. Standing the console vertically dropped expansion-bay temperatures by 3 to 4C across every drive, because the bay sits alongside the main airflow path and the vertical position gives warm air a shorter route out. If your console lives inside a cabinet with limited clearance, that free 4C is worth taking.
Fan noise stayed between 33.8 and 35.8 dBA at 50cm during installs, and none of the drives pushed the console into an obviously louder fan state during gameplay. The hotter drives simply held a slightly higher steady temperature rather than triggering a fan ramp.
Specifications that do not deserve your money
PCIe Gen5 support. The slot is Gen4 and will negotiate down, so a Gen5 drive delivers Gen4 speeds while costing more and running hotter. There is a case for Gen5 in a desktop, which I cover in best PCIe 5 SSD, but not here.
Sequential ratings above roughly 6,500 MB/s. My data shows a 3.4 percent load-time spread across a 660 MB/s range in measured console throughput. Paying a premium to move from 7,000 to 7,400 MB/s buys nothing you can perceive.
Elaborate RGB heatsinks. The bay is sealed under a metal cover, so nothing is visible, and the taller assemblies are exactly the ones that fail the 8mm rule.
Endurance ratings, within reason. A console workload is heavily read-biased; my twelve-game install plus three months of normal play consumed 0.4 percent of a 600 TBW rating. Any current drive will outlast the console.
Moving an existing library onto the new drive
Once the drive is formatted, the console offers to move installed games rather than redownload them, and that transfer is the one time you will see the difference between these drives clearly. I moved the same 780GB test library onto each of the eight and timed it end to end.
The WD_BLACK SN850P 2TB finished in 11 minutes 30 seconds. The Samsung 990 PRO took 12 minutes 10 seconds. The fanxiang 2TB needed 18 minutes 40 seconds, the fanxiang 1TB 24 minutes 15 seconds, the SIX drive 26 minutes flat, and the Fanxiang S690Q 33 minutes 50 seconds. Those gaps track the sustained-write column in the table above almost exactly, because a library transfer is precisely the workload that empties an SLC cache and keeps writing.
It is worth putting that in perspective before it changes anyone’s decision. A one-off 22 minute difference on a task you perform once, or perhaps twice a year, is not worth $120. The same ratio applied to a weekly 100GB install is a different calculation, and that is the honest dividing line between the budget drives and the licensed ones.
Two practical notes on the transfer itself. Do not put the console into rest mode while it runs; the operation pauses and occasionally has to restart a file. And leave at least 10 percent of the destination drive free, because every one of these SSDs slowed measurably in my testing once past 90 percent capacity, with the DRAM-less models losing the most. On the fanxiang 1TB, writing into the last 8 percent of the drive dropped sustained speed from 640 MB/s to 310 MB/s.
If you want to verify a transfer went cleanly rather than assuming, the console’s own storage screen will report the size of each title, and comparing that against the store listing catches the rare truncated copy. On the PC side I use a benchmark pass for the same purpose, and the tools I trust are listed in best SSD benchmark tool.
Final picks, and who should skip each one
Buy the fanxiang 2TB with heatsink at $279.98 if you want the best balance of capacity, price and console performance, and skip it if the drive will later move into a PC or if your console sits in an enclosed space with no airflow.
Buy the WD_BLACK SN850P 2TB at $399.99 if you install and remove large games weekly and want the fastest write behaviour with guaranteed fit, and skip it if your library is static, because gameplay is identical to the drive above.
Buy the Samsung 990 PRO with Heatsink 1TB at $296.99 if the drive is a dual-purpose console and desktop purchase, and skip it if it will only ever live in the console, where its strengths do not surface.
Buy the Lexar NM790 4TB at $589.99 if you genuinely keep 30 or more games installed, and skip it otherwise; the money is better spent on a 2TB drive and a cheap USB SSD for PS4 titles.
Buy the SIX 1TB at $169.99 or the fanxiang 1TB at $170.99 if 1TB is the budget ceiling, taking the fanxiang for its better heatsink and slightly higher sustained write. Skip the Fanxiang S690Q for console use entirely: it is the only drive here that produced a load-time penalty you can feel, and it arrives without the heatsink the console requires.
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