PlayStation 5 was recently updated to support NVMe-based PCI Express 4.0 storage upgrades – so what happens when an Xbox Series S SSD is ripped out of the console and inserted into PS5 instead? That's just one of the many topics covered in this week's DF Direct Weekly where I'm joined by my friends and colleagues John Linneman and Alex Battaglia to cover off a vast array of tech chat – including the Abandoned real-time trailer debacle, the arrival of the RX 6600 XT and the endangered existence of the valuerific 1080p gaming GPU.
But without digging into the video, I'm sure you'd all like to know what happens when an Xbox SSD is placed into PlayStation 5 because here's the thing… it should work. Based on our tests, the console will work with any PCIe gen 4 NVMe drive. The only guidance is that you should be looking for read speed minimums of 5500MB/s. Of course, the theoretical bandwidth of the Xbox drive is much lower (circa 2400MB/s) but the point is that lower speed drives work – Sony just doesn't recommend using them.
And indeed, putting a Series S drive into PlayStation 5 initially looks promising – the drive is recognised by the system and we're invited to format it. Game on! The only problem is that the formatting never completes – we get to 13 percent complete and then the PlayStation 5 hard resets, then needs to have the drive removed, whereupon the system comes back to life, albeit in 480p mode, before the drive database is rebuilt and we're back in business. It's been tested on two different drives now but the bottom line is that we've bricked a Series S to give you the news here. And it's a shame as we would have loved to have seen how Ratchet and Clank would have played…
