Sony has announced that the next major PlayStation 5 update will arrive on April 14 and allow players to store PS5 games on external USB hard drives - but they can't be played until moved back to the console's internal storage. The PS5 currently allows players to use external drives to play PS4 games, running them through the system's backward compatibility feature.
Internal space has been a huge issue for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S systems. The PS5 has a 1TB solid-state drive (SSD), but players only have access to 667.2 GB of that out of the box. This means that players have to be selective with their game downloads, especially those who own the PS5 Digital Edition, as digital games are the only ones they can play. It’s common for a AAA game to take over 50 GB of space, and just a few large titles can easily eat up the majority an internal SSD storage space.
The PS5's first major system update is set to roll out on April 14, and it will allow players to use external drives for PS5 game storage. According to PlayStation Blog, the 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 Sony promises the process is a lot quicker than downloading them after uninstalling.
In order for a drive to be compatible with the PS5, it needs a minimum of 250 GB of space, and can have a maximum of 8 TB of space. It requires SuperSpeed USB 5 Gbps or later, and only one hard drive can be used with the system at a time. The drive cannot be used through a USB hub. There are some games that have the option of letting the player only download the single-player or multiplayer modes, depending on what the player wants.
In future updates, the PS5 is planned to receive compatible SSD external drives (similar to the Xbox Series X/S Seagate Expansion Card) that will extend the system's limited internal storage capacity. Sony confirms that this feature is still being worked on and it will be added in the future. In the meantime, this new method of using regular external hard drives to store PS5 games is a great stopgap solution until the new SSD expansions are released for the PS5 sometime later.
The next PlayStation 5 update will be released globally on April 14, 2021.
Source: PlayStation Blog