PS5 vs Xbox Series X SSD: Which is better?

Solid State Drives are the new buzzword for next-gen consoles. Before it was HD, and before that, it was DVD.

With the deep-dives that Sony and Microsoft have been showing, it’s been interesting to see SSD has the savour of no-loading times.

Sony have been showing this with Spider-Man and Ratchet and Clank, while Microsoft are expected to show off their example next week with the demo of Halo Infinite.

With that, let’s go into the details of the SSD in PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and which one wins out.

Super Sonic Drive

To someone unaware, an SSD (Solid State Drive) is a storage device that has no mechanical parts inside it, it’s all flash memory. This means that the read and write speeds of data can be done incredibly faster than what a mechanical hard drive can do.

When it comes to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, it’s a game-changer, in the sense that games will be able to take advantage of this, resulting in much lower loading screens, and less chance of graphical pop-ups when exploring a large world.

So it comes down to two features that we can compare with and see just which one wins out; speed primarily, followed by storage.

The speed of the SSD shows that the PlayStation 5 clearly wins out, being able to read 5GB of data a second, at the very least. Comparing the Series X SSD speed of 2.2GB a second, Sony’s console completely trounces here.

READ MORE: ‘Optimised for Series X’ Explained.

A Driving Force of Storage

When it comes to storage, the sizes are:

• PlayStation 5: 825GB

• Xbox Series X: 1TB

Apparently these are both sizes that is just for the user, so games, movies and etc can be installed on here. Not a huge difference in size admittedly, but it may add up once Warzone releases on both systems, and the 30GB patches add up.

But again; the size really isn’t the main focus here. It’s how fast the drive reads and writes data. A 4K texture will take much longer to load than a HD texture, and this all adds up when the player is waiting for the game to load.

Which is why this is very telling with Sony, demoing games that tout them as nonexistent loading screens. The SSD in the PlayStation 5 clearly wins out here, but the next focus will now be storage.

It would be welcome if there’s different sized SSD to purchase at launch, but right now, we may need to listen out for the prices of each console to see if that’s even going to be possible in the fall.

READ MORE: How will PSNow work on PS5?