Is SSD Wear an Issue With the PlayStation 5?

howtogeek.com:

All solid state drives (SSDs) suffer from wear that eventually renders them inoperable. The PlayStation 5’s internal SSD is soldered directly to the motherboard. Does this mean your PS5 is doomed as soon as the SSD wears out? It’s too soon to worry.

Since the PS5 SSD is essentially part of the mainboard, any failure of the drive means replacing the entire board along with the CPU and GPU. Strictly speaking, you can manually remove components and solder new ones into a system. However, it’s usually not cost-effective and certainly not something the average user would do, even if they had the necessary parts and equipment.

SSDs store data in memory cells. A cell is either a one or a zero depending on the level of charge within it. Reading the level of charge in the cell leaves it undisturbed, but in order to change that value (writing to it), the memory cell is exposed to a level of voltage that degrades it a little each time. Eventually, the memory cell is so degraded that it can’t hold levels of charge that are different enough to read as either a one or a zero, so it becomes useless.

Different types of SSD memory can take different amounts of wear before giving up the ghost, but the hardiest types cost the most money. MLC or Multi-Level Cell SSD memory stores multiple bits of data per memory cell, which makes it quite cost-effective. Most consumer SSDs, even the ones used in gaming systems, use MLC. However, since its cells have to store multiple bits, it wears down sooner than SSDs that only store a single bit per cell, where the different charge levels remain readable for much longer.

SSDs make up for this by being much, much faster than mechanical hard drives. Also, since they don’t have any moving parts, SSDs tend to