If you're a somewhat older gamer, you'll remember plugging in a few megabytes of memory card to save your games or to update portions of a game that needed patching, but those days are long gone. Internal hard drives have made that sort of worry obsolete and cloud storage only expands on that. But the next generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony have promised blazing fast SSD speeds, and they might achieve it with very different hardware designs.
In the case of the upcoming PlayStation 5, Sony may bring back memory card-style expansion with SSD cartridges that allow users to expand and replace their SSD storage for something larger and faster as and when needed. As WCCFTech explains, Sony recently filed a patent for a PlayStation Cartridge. This would allow Sony to have fast SSD storage, without being constrained by the system's size when larger games are released further down the line, or when it develops faster SSD technology.
Considering the new SSDs are expected to use some version of PCIe SSD technology, a cartridge-like socket system sounds like a viable way to make this a reality.
The question is, how would it implement them? Sony wouldn't want people taking apart their PlayStations, so it may well have a storage slot that lets you plug in a new SSD. That would allow Sony to offer a base configuration, much like the Xbox 360 Arcade edition from the mid-00s, with expandable storage purchaseable after the fact, as well as bundles with the new high-speed SSD, which could unlock certain game features, or even be a necessary upgrade for certain titles in the way that the N64's expansion slot was back in the 90s.
Image render by LetsGoDigital
