Today, the internet has been flooded with tons of PlayStation 5 reviews, as the review embargo has ended. While we didn’t get access to a PlayStation, we’ll have one next week, but I did see an interesting piece of info released today. According to IGN’s PS5 review, it would seem that PS5 will not allow for games to be played if they are installed on an external drive. Instead, they will need to be transferred back to the PS5’s SSD to be played.
Similar to how the Xbox Series X|S will only allow you to play optimized games off the internal SSD or external 1TB storage cart, the PS5 will not play PS5 titles via external storage.
PS5 games can be stored on an external HDD but need to be copied back to the SSD to play, though the near-instantaneous loading times for PS5 games make this palatable. However, it’s worth noting that losing time later to the task of moving stuff around when my SSD invariably fills up may feel a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
What hasn’t been mentioned in IGN’s review if PS4 games could be played off the external drive, this was confirmed on Pushsquare’s review of the PS5. Their review mentions that not only can you install and play PlayStation 4 games off of external storage, but you can also set the PlayStation 5 to always install PS4 games to an external drive. Which is perfect for saving what little space is available on the built-in PS5 storage. Now, I say little, because out of the 825GB, not 1TB, of the available storage, only 667GB is usable, which will quickly be eaten up by larger games such as Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War, which surpasses 130GB from the start.
Update: It’s been confirmed that unlike what IGN mentioned, you can NOT move installed PS5 games to an external drive to free up space. Instead, they will need to be deleted.
https://twitter.com/Nibellion/status/1324727875371732994
This is definitely good to know, and I’ll be setting up a massive external SSD for all my PS4 games. While I make sure all my PS5 titles are installed on the install storage, something that I highly recommend that you should do as well. The PS5 isn’t currently able to use any off-the-shelf SSD’s, as it seems that Sony is still doing SSD certification. This means it might be a while until we’re able to add more readily available and faster storage to the PS5. So save that space while you can.
As for why this is a thing, it just makes sense. Similar to how the Xbox Series X|S won’t play optimized games from external storage, the same reasoning applies to the PS5. PlayStation wants to showcase the tech and the games powered by this tech. Having a brand new PS5 title running from a slower hard drive, which in turn will make games load slower, just goes against the messaging that “NEXT-GEN IS HERE.” Sure, it will eventually force us all to buy more expensive storage in the future, but that’s how technology and its progression works.
The PlayStation 5 releases on November 12th, 2020, in North America, while other regions will see a console launch on November 19th, 2020.
