We've now seen the internal make up of both platforms and both have their SSDs embedded into the system which makes them not easy to replace in the event of a failure. We also now know the general pricing of what we can expect to pay to expand the storage. Right now we have $220 for a 1TB Seagate drive on the Xbox Series S/X and a range of 512GB ($150), 1TB ($230) and 2TB ($450) from Western Digital for the PS5. Both systems should have options from other vendors available at some point as well.
SSDs generally have a pretty decent life span with the number of writes allowed before it's likely to fail, but keep in mind that things like moving large games from cold storage to the main SSD will impact that over time and features like automatically recording game footage from your session and RAM dumps to store the state of the game for quickly jumping between games will also have an impact of how much data is constantly being written to the drive. That's even getting before talking about what games might be doing to write data to the SSD as well. So I believe the write utilization is going to be higher than what one might typically experience on a PC and even on a PC you have an easy way to replace the drive which makes it less of a concern but that isn't true with the embedded SSDs here.
There are some questions to be considered in all this too that we might not know the current answers to. Do we know how each console responds to the event of the internal SSD failing since the OS is contained on it? Will the system be able to use expanded storage as it's main drive instead? Will expanding storage allow you to choose which storage to store games on or will it be one large storage pool that abstracts it for you? These are just some concerns one might have with trying to reduce the wear and tear of the internal drive and why it may be a good idea to expand the system sooner rather than later, especially if your plan is to use it for a long time. Keep in mind, on both systems, upgrading your SSDs do not replace the internal ones; they add on to them.
So getting down to the point of this thread, do you plan on upgrading sooner rather than later to reduce the wear and tear on the internal drive that cannot be replaced?
SSDs generally have a pretty decent life span with the number of writes allowed before it's likely to fail, but keep in mind that things like moving large games from cold storage to the main SSD will impact that over time and features like automatically recording game footage from your session and RAM dumps to store the state of the game for quickly jumping between games will also have an impact of how much data is constantly being written to the drive. That's even getting before talking about what games might be doing to write data to the SSD as well. So I believe the write utilization is going to be higher than what one might typically experience on a PC and even on a PC you have an easy way to replace the drive which makes it less of a concern but that isn't true with the embedded SSDs here.
There are some questions to be considered in all this too that we might not know the current answers to. Do we know how each console responds to the event of the internal SSD failing since the OS is contained on it? Will the system be able to use expanded storage as it's main drive instead? Will expanding storage allow you to choose which storage to store games on or will it be one large storage pool that abstracts it for you? These are just some concerns one might have with trying to reduce the wear and tear of the internal drive and why it may be a good idea to expand the system sooner rather than later, especially if your plan is to use it for a long time. Keep in mind, on both systems, upgrading your SSDs do not replace the internal ones; they add on to them.
So getting down to the point of this thread, do you plan on upgrading sooner rather than later to reduce the wear and tear on the internal drive that cannot be replaced?
