I find it interesting because there are some drives available that, ON PAPER, are fast enough (SN850, 980 Pro, etc). These drives go for about 230 bucks for 1TB. Of course, it should be noted that while this is as expensive, or slightly more expensive, than the Series Expansion Card, they are about twice as fast, so there's that. There's a deal on Amazon right now for 2TB version (980 Pro) for 400 bucks. I am tempted but am still waiting for official word from Sony first.
I definitely think the Series Expansion Card should be a bit cheaper, closer to 150-170 bucks range. I know it's built with a custom heatsink but I can't imagine that adds THAT much to the cost.
Regarding PS5 expansion drives, It makes me wonder if speed is the real roadblock right now, or if it's more just testing the drives extensively and making sure everything plays nice with the PS5 at the OS level, making sure games aren't crashing more often on the internal expansion, etc.
If these drives aren't fast enough to keep up with what the PS5 is doing, then I guess we might be waiting for awhile longer. I think these hit 7000/5300MB/s read/write. If it is gonna take closer to 9GB/s for an expansion drive to stay in line with the PS5/s internal SSD and I/O requirements, then might have to wait until late this year at the earliest? Or no? I don't know how quickly SSDs advance in speed these days. These are currently the fastest drives available.
As
Shmunter
said, a lot of this can be alleviated by just allowing cold storage on external drive, let gamers quick swap PS5 native games from their external to internal instead of deleting and redownloading, etc. I imagine this is an easier/quicker add than enabling the expansion bay and ensuring drives are 100 percent compatible.