By Ruan Martini, Daily Checkpoint
Reports say GTA 6 needs 210GB on PS5. I wrote a whole article about that number already (GTA 6 Is Reportedly 210 GB: Is Your PS5 Ready?, here on the site), so today we skip the panic and go straight to the cure. Quick honesty note before anything else: the 210GB figure is REPORTED, pulled from PlayStation’s own store database by the account PlayStation Game Size and corroborated independently by Insider Gaming. Rockstar has not confirmed it. But preload reportedly opens November 12 and the game lands November 19, and if the real number lands anywhere near 210, a stock PS5 is in trouble. A launch-model console gives you roughly 667GB of usable space. One game eating a third of it is not a storage plan, it is a countdown to deleting something you love at 1AM.
The good news: Sony built the escape hatch into the console. Every PS5, original, Slim and Pro, has an empty M.2 expansion slot under the cover, and a good Gen4 NVMe drive turns your storage problem into a ten-minute job with one screwdriver. Black Friday season is also the one window where 2026 prices might briefly behave, and prices this year need the help. I have been covering the memory crisis on this site for weeks, and SSDs got dragged into the same fire: the ComputingForGeeks price tracker, checked October 27, 2026, had mainstream 2TB drives on Amazon US sitting near $183 per terabyte, with a 2TB Samsung that cost $129 in October 2025 selling for $365.99 a year later. So no, this guide will not pretend 2023 prices are coming back for the holidays. The mission is narrower: buy the right drive once, at the least bad price, before November 12.
What Sony actually requires
Forget the marketing on the boxes for a second. Sony publishes the real rules on its official PlayStation support page, and your drive has to satisfy every one of them.
Your SSD must be a PCI-Express Gen4 x4 M.2 NVMe drive, Key M, Socket 3. Capacity has to fall between 250GB and 8TB. The supported lengths are 2230, 2242, 2260, 2280 and 22110, and in practice almost everything worth buying is 2280, the 22mm by 80mm stick. Sony recommends a sequential read speed of 5,500MB/s or faster. Cooling is not optional: the drive needs an effective heat-dissipation structure, a heatsink or a heat transfer sheet, and the whole package, drive plus cooling, has to fit inside Sony’s size envelope, up to 25mm wide and up to 11.25mm thick (no more than 8.0mm above the board and 2.45mm below it). M.2 SATA drives are not supported at all, no matter how cheap they look. Sony also tells you to update the console’s system software before you install anything, and warns against bolting a second heatsink onto a drive that already has one built in, because stacking them can make the factory cooling work worse.
Two buying traps fall straight out of those rules. Trap one: a fast drive with no heatsink is not PS5-ready out of the box, whatever the listing headline says, so price in a slim aftermarket heatsink if you go that route. Trap two: Gen4 is the requirement, not Gen5. A PCIe 5.0 drive will physically work in the slot at Gen4 speeds, but you would be paying flagship-of-the-future money for performance the console cannot use. Save the money.
How much space should you actually buy
My honest answer for most people: 2TB. It costs real money in this market, I know, but the maths is brutal. GTA 6 at a reported 210GB, plus a day-one patch, plus two or three other big games, plus the PS5’s habit of wanting free headroom for updates, and a 1TB expansion starts feeling tight by Christmas. A 2TB drive takes your total library to a place where you stop thinking about storage entirely, which is the entire point of the upgrade. Go 1TB only if you are disciplined about deleting finished games. Go 4TB if you are a digital hoarder with a backlog you will defend in an argument. I respect it. I am partially you.
One alternative deserves a sentence before the shortlist: an external USB drive. Sony lets you store PS5 games on USB extended storage, but you cannot play them from there, you have to copy them back to internal or M.2 storage first. PS4 games can run from USB directly. As a cold-storage vault it is fine. As the home of GTA 6, it does nothing for you.
The shortlist
Every drive below is a Gen4 x4 NVMe SSD with a heatsink version that fits Sony’s size envelope, quoted in its heatsink form where one exists, because that is the version you should put in a PS5. Speeds are the manufacturers’ own rated figures.
The default buy: WD Black SN850X
If you want one recommendation and no homework, it is this one. The WD Black SN850X in its heatsink version (model WDS200T2XHE for the 2TB) is rated by Western Digital at up to 7,300MB/s sequential reads and 6,600MB/s writes on the 2TB model, with a DRAM cache and a 1,200TBW endurance rating, and WD lists the heatsink model for PlayStation 5 use. It has been the boring, correct answer in this category for years, and boring is a compliment when the job is holding your game library. Price at Amazon: $419.99 for the 2TB with heatsink (checked November 2, 2026). In a sane market I would call that steep. In November 2026 it is, somehow, the value flagship of this list. One sibling worth knowing about: WD also sells the WD Black SN850P, the officially licensed for PS5 model with a heatsink shaped specifically for the console. It is a fine drive, but the license mostly buys you a logo and a higher price, and the SN850X heatsink version does the same job for less.
The premium pick: Samsung 990 PRO with Heatsink
The Samsung 990 PRO with Heatsink (model MZ-V9P2T0CW for the 2TB) is the fastest drive on this list on paper: Samsung rates it at up to 7,450MB/s reads and 6,900MB/s writes, with a DRAM cache, a slim factory heatsink Samsung says is compatible with PlayStation 5, and the same 1,200TBW endurance class as the WD at 2TB. In a PS5 you will not feel a real-world gap between 7,450 and 7,300, because the console is the bottleneck long before either drive is. What you are paying for is Samsung’s controller, its firmware maturity and its warranty machine. Price at Samsung US: $669.99 for the 2TB with heatsink, in stock (checked November 2, 2026), and Best Buy lists the same drive at the same $669.99. That is list price, and list price is not where this drive has to stay: TechRadar reported it at $509 on Amazon on October 7, 2026. My advice is simple. If Black Friday pulls it back toward that level, it becomes a genuine coin flip with the SN850X. At $669.99, the WD wins on value and it is not close.
The value flagship: Kingston FURY Renegade with Heatsink
Kingston’s FURY Renegade with Heatsink is the connoisseur’s pick of this generation: a Phison E18 controller, 3D TLC NAND, a DRAM cache, and rated speeds of up to 7,300MB/s reads and 7,000MB/s writes on the 2TB, the fastest writes on this list. The heatsink model (look for the SFYRDK part codes) measures 80 x 23.67 x 10.5mm, inside Sony’s envelope, and Kingston markets it directly as PS5 ready. Endurance is a quiet strong point too, at 2,000TBW on the 2TB. I am deliberately not printing a price for this one: I could not verify a current US price from a major retailer on the day of writing, and I would rather leave a blank than invent a number. Historically it undercuts the Samsung and trades blows with the WD, so if you catch the heatsink version clearly under the SN850X’s price during the sales, that is a smart buy, full stop.
The endurance veteran: Seagate FireCuda 530 with Heatsink
The Seagate FireCuda 530 with Heatsink was the first big name built for this exact job, launched alongside Sony’s expansion rollout, and its party trick is still endurance: up to 7,300MB/s reads and 6,900MB/s writes on the 2TB, with a 2,550TBW rating that doubles the WD and Samsung figures, plus Seagate’s Rescue data recovery services in the box. The heatsink is a low-profile aluminium block designed with EKWB, and Seagate states plainly that it meets PS5 specs on performance and dimensions. Now the honest status check: this is a 2021 drive, and new stock has thinned out badly by late 2026. Best Buy currently shows the 2TB heatsink model as no longer available new, and the listings that remain are spotty, so I am not printing a price for it either. If you find one new, from a real retailer, at or under SN850X money, the endurance makes it a great buy. If the only copies left are priced like collectibles, wave it goodbye with respect.
The budget case, with eyes open: Crucial P3 Plus
The Crucial P3 Plus is the drive people buy when the budget says no, so let us be precise about what it is. It is a PCIe Gen4 x4 drive, but Crucial rates it at up to 5,000MB/s sequential reads on the 1TB and 2TB models. That is below Sony’s recommended 5,500MB/s. It is also DRAM-less, leaning on Host Memory Buffer on PC, a feature Sony notes the PS5 does not support, and it uses QLC flash, which is slower and wears faster than the TLC in everything above. And it ships with no heatsink, so you have to add a slim one yourself to meet Sony’s cooling requirement, which eats into the savings. Price at Amazon: $344.99 for the 2TB (checked November 2, 2026). In practice the console will benchmark the drive when it formats, drives like this do get used in PS5s, and today’s games will run. But look at the gap: roughly $75 separates it from the SN850X right now, and for that $75 you give up Sony’s recommended speed, the DRAM, the endurance and the heatsink. In this inflated market the budget drive stopped making sense for a console. If you already own one, it is a perfectly good overflow vault for your PS4 library. As a fresh purchase meant to house GTA 6, spend the extra.
The install, at a normal human level
Sony’s official guide makes this a kitchen-table job, and it genuinely is. Update your system software first, while the console is still in one piece. Then shut the PS5 down completely, unplug it, and let it cool. Lay it down, grip the cover and slide it off, no tools needed for that part. Underneath you will find the expansion slot under a metal cover held by a single screw: that is the one Phillips screwdriver moment of the whole operation. Take the slot cover off, remove the screw and spacer inside the slot, and move the spacer to the notch that matches your drive’s length, which for a 2280 drive is the 80 position. Seat the SSD into the connector at a slight angle until it clicks, press it down, and fasten it with the screw. Slot cover back on, console cover back on, plug in, power up. The PS5 will spot the new drive, tell you it needs formatting, and format it. Say yes, because there is no other option and the drive is empty anyway. Last step, the one people forget: go to Settings, Storage, Installation Location and point new game installs at the M.2 drive, so GTA 6’s preload actually lands on the new space on November 12. Ten to fifteen minutes, start to finish, and yes, formatting erases the whole drive, which is why you do this with a new drive and not one holding your PC’s life.
My verdict
Buy the WD Black SN850X 2TB with heatsink unless a sale rearranges the board. Take the Samsung 990 PRO with Heatsink if Black Friday drags it back near that reported $509 level, or if you simply want the fastest box on the shelf and the price does not scare you. Take the Kingston FURY Renegade with Heatsink if it is the cheapest flagship the week you shop. Honour the Seagate FireCuda 530 with Heatsink if you find fair-priced new stock. And leave the Crucial P3 Plus for PC duty. Whatever you pick, the real deadline is not Black Friday, it is November 12, when the preload opens. A drive bought on November 18 at a panic price is just a story you tell later. Tell me what you grabbed in the comments, and if your answer is “I am deleting Call of Duty instead,” know that the drive companies thank you for your service and I will see you in the comments on launch week anyway.
Sources
- PlayStation official support, “How to add an M.2 SSD to a PS5 console” (playstation.com): interface, capacity range, form factors, size envelope, 5,500MB/s recommendation, cooling requirement, installation steps
- Western Digital / WD Black, SN850X product specifications: sequential speeds, DRAM, endurance, heatsink model numbers, PS5 compatibility listing
- Samsung US, 990 PRO with Heatsink 2TB product page (MZ-V9P2T0CW): rated speeds, PS5 compatibility, $669.99 price and stock status, checked November 2, 2026
- Kingston, FURY Renegade SSD datasheet: sequential speeds by capacity, controller, NAND, heatsink model dimensions, endurance ratings
- Seagate, FireCuda 530 Heatsink data sheet and PS5 installation guide: rated speeds, EKWB heatsink, endurance, PS5 spec compliance
- Crucial, P3 Plus product specifications: sequential speeds by capacity, Gen4 interface, DRAM-less design
- Amazon US listings via price history tracking: WD Black SN850X 2TB with heatsink $419.99 and Crucial P3 Plus 2TB $344.99, checked November 2, 2026
- ComputingForGeeks, SSD Prices Tracker (checked October 27, 2026): Amazon US price-per-terabyte levels and year-over-year increases
- TechRadar, reported October 7, 2026: Samsung 990 PRO with Heatsink 2TB at $509 on Amazon, against a $669.99 list price
- Daily Checkpoint, “GTA 6 Is Reportedly 210 GB: Is Your PS5 Ready?” (thedailycheckpoint.com/gta-6-210gb-ps5-storage/): the reported 210GB figure, PlayStation Game Size sourcing and Insider Gaming corroboration
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