Insomniac Games’ Director of Core Technology, Mike Fitzgerald, has revealed that the studio has internally tested some Gen4 SSDs that meet Sony’s recommended specifications, and the results produced by them are “almost indistinguishable” from the PlayStation 5’s internal SSD.
Insomniac has been testing the drives with the recently-released Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and according to Fitzgerald, “it’s looking good.” He tweeted (thanks, The PlayStation Brahs):
Exciting to see PS5 beta testers getting access to the M.2 SSD feature! I’m sure the public beta will result in plenty of benchmarking across different games and drives, but I’ll spoil with some of our results from early testing at Insomniac on Ratchet & Clank: it’s looking good.
— Mike Fitzgerald (@fitzymj) July 29, 2021
The Gen4 drives we tried that met the recommended specs gave results almost indistinguishable from the internal SSD. The rest of the I/O path still in use (hardware Kraken decompression, etc.) is definitely pulling its weight in delivering the crazy loading moments in Rift Apart.
— Mike Fitzgerald (@fitzymj) July 29, 2021
Folks over at Insomniac Games also tested some Gen4 drives that are below recommended specs, and while the results weren’t too bad, the studio did experience up to 15 percent slower loading in some of the most stressed areas of Rift Apart. Fitzgerald asked fans to keep technical specs in mind when making a purchase. Speaking specifically about Rift Apart, he said that the game relies on high-quality storage.
So far, the Seagate FireCuda 530 and Western Digital M.2 NVMe SSDs offer Sony’s recommended specs. We’ll continue to update our readers as more options become available.
