Every PS5-compatible drive we track, scored against its own recent price history rather than against the other drives - so a good verdict means cheap for that drive, and the cost-per-gigabyte column tells you which drive is actually good value. 109 of 110 rows have enough history to score right now. Cheapest capacity on the page is $0.102/GB. Heatsink and bare versions are separate rows and are never scored against each other.
Prices updated · live figures update about once a day
Cheap for this drive15Typical for this drive63Above its usual31Building history1
Computed live at each capacity where we hold both variants, against the cheapest standalone heatsink in stock. The answer flips between capacities, which is why it is calculated rather than asserted.
One caveat on the “buy fitted” rows above, because the arithmetic does not see it: the cheapest fitted drive at a capacity is frequently a budget or unfamiliar brand, and the low end of PS5 storage is where no-name listings concentrate. The comparison is a price calculation, not a recommendation of the specific drive named in it. Check the brand before acting on the saving - Fanxiang is one of the names that turns up in the fitted column regularly, and who makes it and what's inside is worth reading before you buy on price alone - or see Fanxiang within this PS5 cluster for the same heatsink arithmetic applied to just that brand.
Before assembling: check your drive maker's own warranty guidance on removing labels or fitting third-party heatsinks, and check the heatsink's height against the PS5 bay. Our heatsinks page covers both.
What a verdict here actually means
Every drive on this page is scored against its own recent price history, not against the other drives in the table. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A verdict of good tells you this drive is cheap compared with what this drive has been costing; it does not tell you the drive is the best value on the page. The cost-per-gigabyte column answers that second question, and the two columns disagree often enough that reading both is the point.
Heatsink and bare versions of the same drive are separate rows with separate histories, and they are never merged. They are different products at different prices, and scoring a bare drive against a fitted drive's range would manufacture a bargain that does not exist. Where a drive appears twice, look at the variant column before comparing the numbers.
A row that says it is still building history is telling you the truth rather than hedging. Our snapshots accumulate daily, and a drive that entered the catalogue recently has not been observed enough times for a comparison to mean anything. We would rather show the live price with no verdict than compute a confident-looking figure from four days of data.
The verdicts refresh with the prices, about once a day per listing. The timestamp above the table is the last successful refresh of the PS5 rows specifically.
Why the timing of this purchase is unusual right now
PS5 storage demand is not evenly spread through the year. It spikes when a very large game arrives, because that is when a console that was coping suddenly is not, and thousands of people go looking for the same fix in the same week.
GTA 6 is scheduled for 19 November. We have not found an official install size from Rockstar, so we are not going to invent one - our GTA 6 page keeps that figure framed as an estimate until there is something official to cite. What does not require an estimate is the demand pattern: a release of that scale sends a large number of people to buy PS5 storage simultaneously, and simultaneous demand does not usually make things cheaper.
The honest version of the advice is therefore about your own situation rather than a prediction. If you already know you need more space - if you are deleting games to install games today - the argument for buying at a typical price now rather than during launch week is straightforward, and it does not depend on anyone guessing where prices go. If you do not need space today, none of this is a reason to buy.
We are not going to tell you prices will rise. We track them, we publish what they have done, and the flat statement that demand concentrates around large releases is enough to act on without a forecast attached.
List-price theatre, and how to see through it
Console storage is one of the categories where the crossed-out number is least trustworthy. Drives carry a manufacturer list price that is often years old and that nobody has charged in a long time, so a listing showing a large percentage saving against it may simply be showing the ordinary price with a bigger number next to it.
This is exactly what our verdicts are for. A drive sitting at the cheap end of its own recent record is at a genuinely good price whatever the marketing says, and a drive advertised at forty percent off that is priced where it usually sits is being sold to you at its ordinary price with decoration. The verdict badge is the check.
The other pattern worth knowing in this category is the coordinated promotion. Storage brands tend to discount across a whole line at once rather than one product at a time, which means when one capacity of a drive looks unusually good, the others frequently do too. It is worth checking the capacity above the one you were planning to buy before committing.
None of this requires cynicism about the sellers. It requires reading the range column rather than the badge.
The capacity jump, priced today
Cost per gigabyte falls as capacity rises, and on PS5 drives it falls sharply enough that the cheapest drive is frequently the worst purchase in the table.
The reason is the shape of the demand. A PS5 game is large - a current AAA title is commonly somewhere in the region of 100 to 200GB, and the biggest are considerably more, with sizes changing every patch. Our storage calculator carries the approximate figures and where they come from. Against installs of that size, the difference between a small upgrade and the next tier up is often only a handful of games, and the per-gigabyte column shows you what those games cost.
The practical exercise is short. Take the cheapest drive at your intended capacity, take the cheapest at the tier above, and divide the difference by the extra gigabytes. That is the marginal price of the second half of the drive, and on this page it is usually well below the per-gigabyte figure of the smaller drive. Our 1TB-versus-2TB page does that arithmetic live if you would rather read the answer.
The counter-argument is real and worth stating: a hard budget is a hard budget, and a drive you can afford today beats a better drive you buy in three months. The per-gigabyte column is guidance, not an instruction.
The heatsink question, which is a pricing question
A PS5 M.2 drive needs a heat-dissipation structure - Sony's own installation guidance says so, and the drive bay has no airflow of its own. That leaves two routes: buy a drive with a heatsink already fitted, or buy a bare drive and add one.
Both are legitimate, and which is cheaper changes. Standalone heatsinks are inexpensive, so a bare drive plus a heatsink is often the cheaper assembly - but not always, because fitted drives are sold in enough volume that they are sometimes discounted below the parts. The arbitrage block above computes the comparison live at each capacity rather than asserting a rule that goes stale.
Two caveats belong with that arithmetic. Fitting a heatsink yourself means handling the drive and, on some models, removing a factory label - worth checking the maker's own warranty guidance for your specific drive before you do it, because policies differ by manufacturer. And a fitted drive is designed to fit the PS5 bay, which has real dimensional limits; a tall aftermarket heatsink can fail to fit under the cover.
If the saving is a few dollars, buy the fitted drive and skip the job. If it is meaningful, our heatsinks page covers what to look for in the standalone part.
Each drive is compared against its own tracked record from our own snapshots, taken about once a day. A drive priced at the cheap end of that record earns a good verdict; one priced where it usually sits does not, whatever the listing's crossed-out price says. It is a comparison of a drive against itself, never against other drives - the cost-per-gigabyte column is what compares drives to each other, and the two often disagree. We publish the verdict as a label: the only price shown on this page is the current one.
Why do some drives show no verdict?
Because they have not been in our catalogue long enough. A verdict needs enough observations to be meaningful, and a drive seeded recently has a history of days rather than weeks. Those rows show the live price and say they are still building history, which is more useful than a confident number computed from almost nothing.
Should I buy PS5 storage before GTA 6 launches?
If you already need the space, buying at a typical price now rather than during a demand spike is a reasonable decision that does not require predicting anything. Large releases concentrate a lot of buying into one week. We are not forecasting prices and we will not tell you they are about to rise - if you do not need storage today, the release date is not a reason to buy.
Are heatsink and bare versions of the same drive scored together?
No, and deliberately. They are separate rows with separate price histories. They are different products at different prices, and scoring a bare drive against a fitted drive's range would invent a discount. Check the variant column before comparing two rows that share a model name.
Is a bigger discount percentage a better deal?
Not reliably. The percentage is calculated against a manufacturer list price that is often old and rarely charged, so a large discount can just be the ordinary price with a bigger number beside it. The verdict badge is the honest check - it tells you where the current price sits against what that drive has actually been selling for, without us republishing past prices.
How often do these prices update?
About once a day per listing, The timestamp above the table is the last successful refresh of the PS5 rows specifically rather than the moment you loaded the page, so you can see how current the figures actually are.
Buying before November? The PS5 SSD price forecast sets out the two clocks - NAND cost and the release-date demand spike - with live floors per capacity and what would change the read.