A few days ago, a leaker with a solid track record posted the actual release date of the PlayStation 5, as well as the price. This person said the PS5 will be released on November 20th in the US, starting at $499. While this is just a rumor for now, there’s still plenty of cause for excitement. If it’s accurate, that $499 price tag will buy an amazing gaming rig with more powerful hardware than most gaming PCs at two or even three times the price. That includes a custom AMD CPU and GPU, as well as a fast SSD that will make game loading screens a thing of the past. The same leaker also revealed a key detail about the PS5, and it might be the most exciting PS5 rumor we’ve heard so far.
According to @PSErebus’s long series of PS5 tweets, the PS5 will come with 2TB of SSD storage. That would be an incredible upgrade over the current PS4 models that feature 1TB HDDs. Solid state drives have dropped in price in recent years, but a 2TB SSD is still an expensive upgrade for any PC, whether it’s a traditional computer or a gaming rig. Placing a 2TB SSD inside a device that sells for just $499 would be a fantastic thing to do for Sony.
https://twitter.com/PSErebus/status/1196523514305617921
The leaker says Sony released the 500GB PS3 in October 2012, and then a year later, the first PS4 model launched with the same capacity SSD, only it was priced $100 more than the PS3 version.
https://twitter.com/PSErebus/status/1196524800426074129
He said Sony will use the same strategy for the PS5 going forward.
https://twitter.com/PSErebus/status/1196526074731155456
If you were wondering, there already is a 2TB PS4 Pro out there, one that was released only in Japan last year as a “500 Million Limited Edition” model.
https://twitter.com/PSErebus/status/1196538698919268353
The person explicitly stated that the $499 PS5 will feature a 2TB SSD, in the following tweets:
https://twitter.com/PSErebus/status/1196571384505352192
Again, if accurate, that’s easily the most exciting PS5 rumor so far. Also, the Xbox Scarlett will probably match Sony when it comes to base storage for the cheapest console.
A series of reports based on a mysterious Sony patent speculated that Sony might use modular SSD storage to keep the PS5’s price down at launch and make storage upgrades easy to perform down the road. It turned out that the patent in question was describing technology used for a different Sony product, one that’s sold only in Japan.
Even is @PSErebus is wrong about the PS5’s storage and 2TB won’t be the base storage version for the console, the entry-level PS5 will probably ship with at least 1TB of storage. After all, games developed for PS5 will likely require more storage, considering that developers will be able to deliver significantly improved content.
Sony confirmed that games will ship on 100GB disks, which means some of those future games will require plenty of storage. Interestingly, Sony also said that game downloads and installation will work differently on the PS5, as gamers will be able to choose how much content to install. That sounds like a great storage-saving measure, one that gamers who lots of games might appreciate.
With all that in mind, Sony’s PS5 might be announced as soon as February. Once that happens, we’ll find out exactly how much storage the base model will include and how much money you’ll have to shell out for it.
