Pat PilcherGames are more and more storage-hungry. PAT PILCHER gets all excited about a solution that promises an end to storage woes.
The other day, I went to install a PS5 game to review it. I hit a brick wall in the form of no free storage. This shouldn’t have been a huge surprise: the paltry usable storage on a PS5 is a mere 667GB, while the average PS5 game title weighs in on average at somewhere between 40–50GB. (Unless it’s a REALLY BIG title such as Call Of Duty which is 200GB+). Die-hard PS5 fanatics are likely to run out of storage sooner rather than later.
Instead of pondering which games to nuke to free up space, Playstation 5 owners now have another option in the form of PNY’s PS5-friendly XLR8 CS3140 M.2 NVMe Gen4x4 Solid State Drive. It delivers ultra-zippy speeds and runs like a cat on a hot tin roof (which is why PNY XLR8 also launched the PS5 SSD Heatsink to keep things cool).
When I say it’s fast, I’m not kidding. According to the folks at PNY, it’s a whopping 13 times faster than SATA based SSDs (which already make old school mechanical hard drives look positively sluggish by comparison).
So how fast is the XLR8 CS3140? PNY says it’ll deliver a stonking transfer speed of up to 7,500 MB/s. This translates into faster boot-up times, zippier application launches and better overall system performance. Crucially, the XLR8 CS3140 also has low power consumption. Being solid-state, it’s also silent compared to old-school mechanical drives (which sound like a faulty waste-master eating the family cutlery).
The XLR8 CS3140 uses the latest NVMe Gen 4.0 protocol. This translates into more bandwidth for extreme gaming performance and low latency. It’ll deliver sequential speeds of up to 7,500MB/s (Read) and 6,850MB/s (Write), making it vastly superior to SATA and NVMe Gen 3 based SSDs – which were already blisteringly fast.
All told, waiting for games to load could soon be nothing more than a quaint memory used by gamers of a certain age wanting something to grizzle about. The XLR8 CS3419 comes in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities, which should be ample for holding your PS5’s bulging stash of games.
NZ pricing is still to be announced but we bet it’s well worth the investment.
