PlayStation 5 Has A Rough Storage Restriction

As we inch ever closer to the PlayStation 5's release date, we're learning more and more about it. Today's new morsel of information concerns the capabilities of the PlayStation 5 when it comes to managing storage. On launch day at least, it seems the PlayStation 5 will have some strange limitations when it comes to transferring games between drives.

So says Digital Foundry, which has published a new report that claims it isn't possible to move PlayStation 5 games off the console's internal SSD. While we already knew that the PS5's M.2 expansion slot won't be active on launch day, the console will still be compatible with external USB drives, but it's clear now that those external drives won't offer much value when it comes to archiving PS5 games.

This, unfortunately, means that when it comes time to actually manage your PS5 game installs, your only option will be to delete games you aren't playing to make room for new ones. It's almost inevitable that many PS5 users will have to do that before long, as the PlayStation 5 only has 667GB of internal storage. Given how massive some games can be, the available storage on PlayStation 5 is likely going to fill up very quickly.

Digital Foundry points out that the Xbox Series X is in a similar – though not exactly identical – boat, as it won't run Xbox Series X games from external storage either (save for the 1TB expansion card users will be able to purchase). However, the Xbox Series X has an advantage here in that users can archive their next-gen games on external drives, simply moving them back to the internal SSD when they want to play them. PlayStation 5, it seems, offers no such archive feature.

Additionally, it seems that PS5 users won't be able to back up their game saves to USB drives as they could on PlayStation 4, though the option to back up saves to the cloud still exists. While it makes some degree of sense that Sony would limit running PS5 games to only the internal SSD and those approved for use in the console's expansion slot (since the argument is that the SSD is integral to the PS5 experience), here's hoping that the company decides to allow archiving on external drives, otherwise PS5 users are in for a lot of deleting and re-downloading.