Even with a speed below the recommended, the game from Insomniac Games does not suffer at all.

PlayStation 5 already allows you to expand the storage with additional M.2 SSDs , as long as they are compatible with the console. And many may choose to go for the higher-end options, the ones that offer the highest transfer speeds. Not surprisingly, the speed of the PS5 SSD was one of the most talked-about features of the console before its premiere, with studios like Insomniac Games claiming that their game, Ratchet and Clank: A Dimension Apart , would not be possible without the SSD of the console. Well, it turns out that the latest Ratchet and Clank works just as well on the console’s worst supported SSD as it does on the PS5’s internal drive.

And that it has a speed lower than recommended. This is revealed by a new technical analysis from Digital Foundry, who have tested the performance of the 250GB Western Digital SN750 SE storage on PS5. As you will not recognize by its acronym, it is the “slowest” SSD of all those compatible with PS5, with speeds of 3200MB / s compared to the 5500MB / s that Sony asks for its console. That is, it is 42% slower than recommended by the company.

Well, despite a very noticeable speed difference, this NVMe SSD offers the same performance as the original PS5 when playing Ratchet & Clank: A Dimension Apart. “Despite not meeting key requirements, I have not encountered problems with it installed on my PS5,” says Richard Leadbetter, editor of Digital Foundry. “The first thing was to transfer Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart to disk and play it, where I found that the experience in the game was essentially identical to playing it from the internal SSD and from the much faster SN850.” As well as detail, the SN850 is the SSD that Mark Cerny recommends for PS5.

The medium goes on to explain that, at most, a single frame of more or less was appreciated when using the game’s portals . “For the most part, the experience of playing the title on all three SSDs has proven to be indistinct in the areas where we have tested it.” In the timetable that Digital Foundry has compiled during the review, it can be seen that the load times for Ratchet and Clank are almost identical on the PS5 SSD, on the slowest possible SSD and the fastest SN850 model. With one exception: the only time where the “worst” available SSD shows differences is when launching the game from the main menu, where it takes 10 seconds versus 7 seconds for the internal SSD. Beyond there, the performance is level.

They have also compared loading times in games like Ghost of Tsushima, Control, and Cyberpunk 2077. In all of them, the three SSDs offered the same performance. Of course, where you can see a difference is when copying games from one disc to another, where the “slow” model takes several minutes longer than the faster model to move the same game. But, when it comes to playing, it seems that there are no appreciable differences. A sign that the new generation games have barely managed to scratch the possibilities of having a higher memory speed.