PlayStation 5 won’t support expandable SSD storage at launch

Sony has said that PlayStation 5 won’t support expandable SSD storage at launch.

PS5 system architect Mark Cerny said in March that SSD storage expansion support was likely to arrive “a bit past” PS5’s launch, which has today been confirmed.

“[T]his is reserved for a future update,” Sony told The Verge.

PS5 will reserve approximately 20 percent of its 825GB internal SSD storage for operating functions, leaving around 664GB usable for software, according to leaks.

The first PS5 game file size details suggest that the console’s flagship launch titles could take up a significant chunk of the console’s storage.

As revealed on the PlayStation website, first-party launch title Demon’s Souls will require a “minimum” of 66GB SSD space, while Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales will require 50GB.

The Ultimate Edition of Miles Morales, which includes a PS5 remaster of Insomniac’s 2018 Spider-Man game, takes up a significant 105GB of memory space.

However, Sony has said PS5 will offer players more flexibility in how they manage their storage on the console, with users able to configure installations and choose to install just a game’s multiplayer or delete the single-player campaign once completed.

PS5 owners will eventually be able to expand their internal storage with Sony-certified, off-the-shelf SSDs. However, drives capable of PS5’s huge bandwidth will likely be expensive in the short term.

As Digital Foundry’s Rich Leadbetter previously explained: “In the short term at least, the advice is simple: don’t buy an NVMe drive without Sony validation if you plan to use it in PlayStation 5. Also remember that extreme bandwidth PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives are likely to be very expensive – in the short term, at least.

“This is cutting-edge technology, after all. Obviously though, the outlook should improve significantly as the next generation progresses – and prices do tend to drop significantly over time.”

PS5 will support USB external storage from day one, enabling users to play PS4 titles not stored on the next-gen console.

Further reading

Sony has released a trio of PlayStation 5 instructional videos

Showing how to use your account, customise settings and transfer data from PS4