Key Takeaways
- SATA SSDs are cheap and a good option for console storage upgrades.
- Using a SATA SSD vs. a mechanical drive noticeably improves game loading performance for last-gen titles.
- USB SATA drives are useful for transferring and storing games, and can coexist with NVME storage.
You may know that the latest PlayStation and Xbox consoles let you use a USB external drive for additional storage, but you may have heard that there’s no point in using a USB SSD. While there are some limitations, the truth is that external SSDs can be an excellent upgrade for your console.
Note, I’m talking about USB external SSDs here, not the NVME SSD expansion slot on the PS5 or the proprietary storage expansion modules for Xbox Series consoles.
SATA SSDs Are Cheap Now
There are two main types of SSD in common use these days: SATA and NVME. SATA is, at most, limited to 600MB/s, but the USB ports on a modern console can handle that level of throughput with ease. Which is good news, since SATA SSDs are dirt-cheap now. You can pick up a 2TB SATA SSD from a reputable brand like Teamgroup for under $100 and the 4TB model for around twice that.
Remember that the main problem with buying a cheap SSD is that it’ll likely wear out more quickly than more expensive SSDs if you write to them a lot. However, that’s not an issue specifically when using these drives as expanded storage for a console. The drive won’t get written to much at all, unless you are constantly deleting and installing games at a frenetic pace. You can even dare to go cheaper, as long as the read speed performance is still good enough. If the SSD fails, at most you’ve lost game data that can just be downloaded again. Save games are either stored in the cloud or on the main console.
Last Gen Games Still Benefit
There’s no point in using an NVME SSD over USB with your console, since the USB port isn’t fast enough to take advantage of it, nor can the game these consoles run over USB make full use of it anyway. SATA SSDs, on the other hand, are still significantly faster than the mechanical hard drives backward-compatible games were designed for. Which means there’s a definite and noticeable uplift in game loading performance using these drives. It’s not equally apparent in every game, but playing open-world PS4 games on my PS5 definitely feels snappier, and issues such as texture streaming pop-in are often reduced or eliminated.
It Frees Up NVME Space
What’s quite telling to me, is that while I notice an improvement going from a mechanical drive to SATA SSD, running these games from the internal NVME SSD on my new consoles doesn’t make things noticeably better.
Since NVME storage on consoles is expensive to expand, and you don’t get much of it by default, it makes sense to use cheap SATA SSD storage space for these older backward-compatible games and leave more room for cutting-edge games that can only run from the internal SSD.
Games in Cold Storage Install Much Faster
While you can’t play current-generation games using a USB drive, you can download or transfer your current gen games to a USB drive and then copy them to the internal SSD when you want to play.
While copying a game from a mechanical hard drive over USB is similar to downloading it on a Gigabit internet connection, I doubt anyone has a 600MB/s internet connection and even if they did, Sony and Microsoft aren’t serving game downloads at those speeds.
So a USB SATA drive is useful for playing musical chairs with your games. Maybe you don’t feel like playing Call of Duty right now, but you also don’t feel like repeatedly downloading hundreds of gigabytes of data. At half a gig per second, it doesn’t take long at all to get back in the game when the fancy does strike you again.
You Can Mix It Up
You don’t have to choose between a SATA SSD or a mechanical drive. On the PS5, you can have multiple external drives, and swap between them. The only limitation (apart from an 8TB size limit) is that you can’t use more than one drive at once. Over on Xbox Series consoles, you can use multiple drives at the same time. So, on my Series S, I have a 5000GB SATA SSD and a 1TB mechanical drive hooked up at the same time.
One last tip worth remembering is that you don’t need to buy a specialized external SATA drive. You can take any 2.5-inch SATA SSD and convert it to a USB drive using a cheap external enclosure. Just make sure you’re using SATA III for both the drive and enclosure to get the best possible performance!
