People should be more worried about the new patent showing what seems to be SSD expansion modules. If the base Ps5 wont come with a big enough SSD in order to be more affordable, players will need to buy such proprietary expansion cartridges. And anything proprietary is expensive. Like the 100 plus bucks Psvita memory cards. Design is the least of the worries.

And the price tag do you suggest would they come with? A good 1TB SSD cost well over a hundred bucks. 200? 300? 400 for a 1TB PS5 SSD? Rather not. 

No idea, but if Sony really intends to sell SSD expansions and players have no other option because PS5 SSD is customized, forcing players to buy the Sony proprietary units, things will get expensive scary.

I'd say it would be more likely that USB external storage will still be allowed, but the SNY SSD carts will be close to the price of an equivalent external SSD, so you might as well spend slightly extra and just get the cart. That's what SNY would be hoping for anyway, since you would almost definitely want more storage.

This would also mean you're talking like a 500GB-1000GB SSD on board, with an SSD expansion port. If you add, say, a $100, 1TB cart, you now have 1.5TB-2TB of fast storage. Or you can buy an external SSD/HDD for less, but you have to transfer games to the on board SSD to play them, depending on how easy and quick that is to do.

Would you rather spend a little more money with no wait times, or would you rather spend less (or more but getting more HDD storage space) and wait, or spend time transferring game files when you have time so you don't have to wait later?

It would be a total disaster. Console is something you plug a game and play, not managing game files between inactive storage(slow HDD) and active storage(SSD).

Wouldnt plug n play be a crucial intention behind SSD cartridge system? Current gen relies on build in storage that is rather replaced with larger capacity/faster products. As i understand it a system with proprietary storage modules would handle it as quasi external storage you could plug in and out whenever, conviniently without dismantling and formating. An extra module would be additional storage, not a replacement, with the main system keeping track of the installed games on registered modules.

Well as far as I'm concerned, there's only two main ways to go about this, if they are going to approach it this way. Either:

1. They force you to use their own proprietary SSD carts, which as you stated, could be a nightmare due to lesser storage for unreasonable costs.

or

2. They give you the option to use an existing, cheaper, or much larger external HDD, but you have the nightmare of unreasonable data transfers.

One way or another it doesn't look great on them, but one way allows for an extra option, even if it sucks. The only way it looks reasonable on them, using this approach, is if the SSD's are very close, if not cheaper than comparable off the shelf SSD storage.

Yeah, it's preferable that Sony go for proprietary storage expansion because it will have the same speed as the native SSD, even if it means being salty. People don't have good memories for Sony proprietary stuff. But it's way better than allowing USB external hard drive and keep transferring files between it and the SSD.

Sony is also allowing transferring files between the blu-ray disc and the SSD.

Sony is also allowing transferring files between the internet and the SSD.

So why would it be bad allowing to transfer files between an external HDD or "slow" SSD and the internal SSD? Especially if they make that transfer fully automatic in the background.

F.e. 100 GB of the internal 1TB SSD could be reserved for the currently played game. Or 500 GB of the internal 1TB SSD could be reserved for the last played 3 - 10 games, on the other part you can "pin" your favorite games you constantly want on the SSD. If you start a game stored on the external drive, it will be copied within minutes to that area; much faster than a reinstall from the blu-ray or a redownload from the internet. Perhaps the game could start instantly from HDD to the main menu and while you are still chosing the game mode or watching the intro, the rest of the game is already copied to the internal SSD.

I will buy it day one