Playstation 5 Games Can Now Be Stored On External USB Hard Drives

It has been announced today that a significant PS5 update will drop on the 14th of April. This new update will enable players to store their PS5 games onto external hard drives via USB.

However, it should be noted that this feature does come with a catch; the games stored on the USB external drive cannot actually be accessed or played until they are manually moved back onto the console’s internal storage. The PS5 does currently allow gamers to utilize external drives to play Playstation 4 games.

Ever since launch, storage space has been a major problem for both the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S systems. The PS5 comes with a 1TB SSD already installed, but only 667.2 GB of that is actually accessible to players.

This has meant that early adopters of the next gen consoles have had to be selective when it comes to their game downloads. This applies in particular to gamers who opted for the PS5 Digital Edition of the console, as digital games are the only games that can be played on that version of the machine.

Frankly, it is becoming more and more commonplace for AAA games to take 50 GB+ of storage space. This current trend of games coming with installs of a significant size means that just a few AAA titles can easily take up the majority of an internal SSD drive very quickly.

According to PlayStation Blog post that announced the update; “this update will allow players to move games that have already been downloaded onto the PS5 onto compatible external USB drives. PS5 games cannot be downloaded straight onto the external drive and it must be downloaded onto the console’s internal storage first. These games also cannot be played from the external drive, a limitation of the console’s proprietary internal SSD. This new feature is a way to store games so that they can quickly be reinstalled on the system, as the process is a lot quicker than downloading them after uninstalling.”

There are a few specs required for an external drive to be compatible with the Playstation 5; it needs a minimum capacity of 250GB and a maximum capacity of 8TB. It requires SuperSpeed USB 5 Gbps or later and only one hard drive can be used with the system at one time. It should also be noted that the storage drive cannot be used through a USB hub.

Unfortunately, the activation of the M.2 slots in the PS5 console is not a feature included in this update. When it came to details regarding this, the blog mentioned that; “as previously announced, the PS5 console will support storage expansion via M.2 drives in the future. We’re currently working on this feature and will keep you posted with any updates on PlayStation Blog.”

Buy tickets for BGCP Comic Con in and around Glasgow Scotland – BUY TICKETS

Check out all of our Comic, Movie, Television and Videogame Reviews HERE and our Podcasts/Interviews HERE

If you want to be part of the BGCP community, Join us on Discord, Twitter, Instagram etc then click HERE