Anyone looking to get a PlayStation 5 may want to consider adding external storage for their PS5 onto their necessary accessory watch list. Based on information released by Sony, it appears that after the OS, the PlayStation 5 only has 825 GB available and while that might still sound like a lot to some people, once you consider the install sizes of some launch titles, it might not be enough, in the long term.
According to the pre-order pages for Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the Ultimate Launch Edition will install with a minimum of 105GB whereas the base edition will install for a minimum of 50GB. Demon’s Souls looks like it will be doing the same kind of damage coming in at a minimum of 66GB install space. This has been confirmed that this does not include plans for future DLC, so that means that if you were to install these three games, alone, you would be looking at almost a quarter of your hard drive space taken up. That’s pretty crazy.
This doesn’t account for the mass of PS4 titles that will be available for PlayStation Plus members at launch day and it doesn’t account for the mass of titles users will likely want to play out of the box that’s on the PS4 backwards compatibility list. If you even consider just the eighteen games available through the PlayStation Plus program at launch, you could look at a very large volume of space if you were like me in the fact that you would want to have them all installed and ready to play whenever the impulse struck.
This was kind of a problem that some may have foreseen when Sony released the specs of the PlayStation 5 but a bigger problem still remains: none of the external SSDs I could find were able to keep up with the performance speeds that most of the PlayStation 5’s games and UI requires and the only internal drive that I could find that would be suitable for use with the PlayStation 5 hasn’t been certified by Sony yet, according to Finder, and it’s a huge investment considering it’s not been thoroughly tested by Sony for compatibility reasons. Just because a drive has been listed as working with the PlayStation 5 doesn’t mean that it will work as it should. However, it does look like this is something Sony is constantly working on and we shall see a solution for in the near future, hopefully.
As it stands, without any real alternative, it looks like an external hard drive would be used as storage and you would move the games you’re frequently playing from the external source to the system when you want to play them; at least, until a solution for external storage on PS5 is announced, anyway.
