Yo! If you want to absolutely crush those load times and get the most bang for your buck, you gotta look at the Samsung 990 Pro 1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe. Everyone talks about the older 980, but the 990 is just a total beast! It hits up to 7,450 MB/s which is basically maxing out the PS5 bandwidth. Its so fast its almost overkill, but for 110 bucks you can usually snag one on sale and it feels amazing. If you want to save a few bucks for another game, definitely check out the Crucial T500 1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe. It uses this amazing 232-layer TLC NAND which makes it super power efficient. Efficiency equals less heat, and I love how cool this thing runs! Here is why these are the absolute kings of value right now:

• Random read IOPS are insane on the 990 Pro, which helps with assets loading instantly in games like Spider-Man.
• The T500 is often way cheaper but benchmarks almost identically in real-world PS5 tests.
• Both are way more reliable than the random brands you see floating around on sale. About the heatsink... honestly, just buy a cheap third-party one like the Sabrent M.2 NVMe PS5 Heatsink and slap it on a bare drive yourself. It takes like two minutes and saves you 20 or 30 bucks compared to the pre-installed versions. Its literally just a metal sandwich with some thermal tape. You totally got this!

I've tested a few of these and honestly the Western Digital BLACK SN850X 1TB NVMe SSD is your best bet for value. It consistently hits the speeds Sony recommends and runs very stable. You definitely need a heatsink because that internal bay gets zero airflow. You can save money buying a bare drive and adding a Sabrent M.2 NVMe PS5 Heatsink, but for $110 you can usually find the integrated version on sale anyway.

Agreed on the heatsink. Unfortunately, thermal dissipation is often insufficient. I've seen drives throttle due to heat, which is honestly a huge letdown for such an expensive upgrade.