Thanks
BusierDonkey
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
for the summary and reasoning. I am sold, yeah that seems replaceable. It is smart on MS part if you think about repairing consoles and selling refurbished parts and definitely a corner Sony cut or rather an optimisation they took to achieve their performance target early and contain costs.
Not sure how Sony plans to replace them, but they might have a clever way to do it in their factory. I am also not sure MS will sell compatible drives you are allowed to replace yourself (and without voiding the warranty) though.
It is also possible that the user replaceable SSD could be used to replace the internal SSD if it failed, it seems like a much better way to keep the console working albeit at a lower storage capacity.
For a company like Sony, it wouldn't be difficult at all to replace a bad NAND chip soldered on the board. Compared to engineering and assembling a console, that stuff is trivial. Now, if you knew certain skilled repair people around your area that could do it for you (and for cheaper), theoretically they could do it, but that would void the warranty (if they screw it up), and (I can't recall who brought this up. Maybe it was here, or B3D, or Era) the system might be expecting a specific brand, or NAND module class, or even specific NAND module.
...I don't know how likely the last of those cases would be, and I don't see a point for it other than being extremely uptight about security, but there would be better ways to do that without such a stringent requirement. I agree that even tho the internal SSD in Series systems might be replaceable, there's still a strong likelihood users would have to ship the system back (or at the very least, apply for a replacement to be mailed in to them) to have a new one slotted in.
I guess for both PS5 and Series systems, if the internal drive by some freak chance failed (that really shouldn't happen but there's always that very fringe possibility a handful of bad units gets out there), the user-supplied optional expansion storage could be used. But the OS in both cases would need to format that drive the same way the internal ones were formatted. That could prove to be tricky, so I'm wondering if the systems have some private block of NAND on the board that holds the base OS files that can be reinstalled on the internal drive anytime.
If not that would make it very tricky a thing to do indeed, and in PS5's case perhaps a bit more because at that point you're talking about 3P NVMe drives that could have some different formatting and just ways they are structured with their own onboard NAND (capacity per module, channels per module, the onboard memory controller, latency levels, page and block sizes, etc.) that could be things the OS isn't designed with in mind to run off of. But again, I don't see it being a big possibility because there's prob some private block of NAND onboard housing compressed OS files.
.
