Sony has confirmed that the PS5's storage expansion slots will not be ready for next week's launch. Sony has been warning against purchasing NVMe M.2 SSDs for over a year now, and has now revealed to The Verge that it will not have a compatibility list at launch.

Sony recently revealed the storage expansion slots on the PlayStation 5 in a live webcast. However, the company is hesitant to offer much in the way of recommendations for storage expansion, citing other limitations we do not yet know about.

These limitations are likely firmware-based, as the PS5 uses a custom in-house I/O controller that is different from others; the console's high bandwidth of 5.5GB/s is outside the realm of many current PCIe 4.0 SSDs (Samsung's 980 Pro delivers 6.9GB/s ), but it is not out of the realm of the PS5, but perhaps more checkboxes need to be checked before the drive can support PS5.

Sony had indicated in its initial technical survey in March that expandable storage would be available somewhat later than launch. That was a decade ago. That was also when it first told users to "hold off on getting M.2 drives until you hear from us."

The PlayStation 5's 825GB of internal SSD storage will provide plenty of space for games in the meantime, albeit a bit less than the advertised capacity once the OS is installed and system reservations drain a bit of capacity.

The Xbox Series S was recently rumored to have only 364GB of usable capacity on a 512GB drive after a system request, but our review unit confirmed that only 362GB was actually available out of the box.Xbox Series X review, it appears that the Quick Resume feature is blocking out some of that capacity.

At the very least, Sony has confirmed that external HDDs or SSDs can be used to augment the internal storage. While standard HDDs and SSDs will not reach the blazing speeds of the PS5's internal drive, Sony says they will be a great way to store PS4 games with less bandwidth requirements.

We will have to wait for a faster solution to come along. There is still hope for broad compatibility with common PC PCIe 4.0 drives, such as those listed in our roundup of the best SSDs for gaming.