They do effect gameplay. For example, the Leftovers item that you start with heals you when you’re outside of combat. One item boosts damage, and one item heals you when you hit with your non-basic attacks.

Or you can just play it and have fun. My 7 year old is having an absolute blast and gets super excited when he’s saved enough to unlock something new.

I’m not worried about the installation, it’s the idea of finding the right combination of drive and heatsink that stresses me out.

yeah, and in three years these 1tb drives will probably cost $100 or less, while history shows proprietary memory tends to stay expensive longer.

This right here.

How are slots not easier than that internal cage in the PS4? This seems to require fewer screws, even.

I don’t think it’s that complicated. It looks easier than upgrading a PS4's internal drive, which required you to pay attention to whether the drive you were buying was a 2.5" drive (not a spec that’s always advertised HDD boxes at stores, but you could save some money by buying an external marketed for laptops and…

It’s an SSD with a sequential read in the mid 2000s and they are charging $220 for it. It’s a $120 drive in a $100 plastic shell. 

Am I the only one who feels like Expandable memory was an after thought on the PS5?

Most of the NVME drives with the speed requirements that Sony has put into place will already have heatsinks either pre-installed or they come with the NVME drive in the box.

Ease-of-install aside, it’ll probably be cheaper by this time next year to get a 1TB SSD and pay Geek Squad to install it than it will be to buy the proprietary.

The performance isn’t going to be much of a factor, but with the rate that SSD tech has been dropping in price over the last few years, the Sony solution is going to be substantially cheaper in probably 2 years.

It may be competitive now, but the PS5 solution is going to drop in cost at an exponentially faster rate because it’s non-proprietary tech. Yeah, it’s a little bit of extra work (Almost identical to the process on a laptop, which is a less than five minute job anyone with $5 for a screwdriver set can do), but it’s…

It's actually much easier because there are fewer screws and you don't need to reinstall the OS. 

People seem to forget that the only way to expand storage on a PS4 (until 2017) was to physically replace the internal drive altogether, which required you to also get a flash drive and a PC/Mac to download the OS files and put things in the right folders and so on.

I don’t see what the big deal is. While The X/S is simpler it’s sure to be a lot costlier over time as eventually high capacity NVMe SSD’s will drop in price but custom designed drives are always gonna cost a lot and offer less options. I’m actually surprised and happy they require/recommend a heat sink on the SSD’s.…

Seems like you’re bashing Sony unnecessarily for this. It’s simple to upgrade on Xbox because they only give you one option. This is essentially the same way upgrading your drive worked on PS4, except the system architecture here requires a more advanced drive. 

Totally. I'd love to get one for my series s, but if i wanted that i should have gotten a series x in the first place. While I fully maintain that the average consumer will not bother with the extra drives on either system, Microsoft's option has the edge right now in what I'm calling gift-ability. In that a…

The biggest issue with the Microsoft option is that it’s only 1 TB. It’s not outrageously priced for what it is, really, but it’s just a pain being stuck with one size option. And yeah, it’s easier to install, but... how often are you going to take it out? It’s like 5 extra minutes of work once and then never again on…

I would take Sony’s NVME solution over Microsoft, but I am also a tech enthusiast so this all sounds basic and rudimentary to me. Microsoft’s solution is obviously far easier, but it does not offer the performance that Sony’s does.

There are strengths and weaknesses to both of them.  I opted into the beta so hopefully…