Expanding the internal storage of your game console is a bit of a luxury in 2026, but it can make your life a lot easier. With some games using upwards of 100 gigabytes (GB) of hard drive real estate, the sub-1TB drive in your PS5 really doesn’t feel like room. With the PS5 specifically, the best way to expand your storage is by installing an M.2 SSD—it’s very easy to set up! Honestly, picking a compatible drive is tougher than slotting one in. Unfortunately, with component prices soaring, this kind of SSD is especially expensive right now, and that may make the price of that upgrade a bit hard to swallow. (As is the PS5’s new $600 price tag.)
While it isn’t ideal, you can also expand your PS5’s storage using an external SSD, which allows you to put some PS5 games you aren’t currently playing in “cold storage” for later. You can’t run games off an external drive–that’s why we don’t recommend them in our guide to PS5 SSDs–but transferring games onto an external SSD instead of simply deleting them allows you to transfer them back more quickly, and without using up major internet bandwidth. Until recently, I’d have only recommended this if you already have one of these drives lying around, but today it feels increasingly like a frugal compromise for thrifty upgraders.
So incorporating an external SSD into your PS5 setup will change the way you do things a little bit. If you want to play a PS5 game you have stored on your external drive, you have to first move it to your PS5’s internal drive.
It’s a little more work than pressing “download” on the PlayStation Store, but not much. Go into the settings menu on the PS5’s home screen. Click storage, and then click extended storage. You’ll see the library of games stored on your external drive. From there, select the game you want and press “move to console storage” to start the transfer. In my experience, even a big game should only take five to 10 minutes to download.
Connecting the external SSD to your PS5 isn’t tricky, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. You want to make sure to use one of three faster “SuperSpeed” USB ports, which support up to 10Gbps transfer speeds. Confusingly, three of the four USB ports on the console support this standard, but there’s also a slower “Hi-Speed” port, which you should reserve for charging controllers. That means you should avoid using the USB-A port on the front panel of an older PS5, or the top USB-C port on a newer PS5. Both USB-A ports on the back of the PS5 are “SuperSpeed,” so if you aren’t sure, just stick it in the back.
I recommend you set aside a hard drive to use specifically as your PS5 cold storage, because you will need to format the drive for that purpose. When you plug your SSD into the PS5, it will offer to format it for you, so this is very easy, but reformatting will delete everything on there already. You should still be able use the drive for basic file transfers and storage with any Mac or PC after reformatting, but in the interest of avoiding potential conflicts, I tend to set my PlayStation storage aside for PlayStation gear.
Since the PS5 won't play games off your external drive, you will have become a bit more conscious about what games are on your PS5, versus what games are on the external drive. It’s important to always keep enough storage free on your PS5’s hard drive to download a game so you don’t have to manage your storage every time you want to play a game. The best way to do that, I’ve found, is to “put games away” when you’re done with them: Take a little time to transfer games over to the external when you finish them or find yourself playing them less. That way you’re constantly freeing up space, and the games you may want to return are in storage, rather than the cloud.
If you're a longtime PlayStation player and have built up a beefy library of PS4 games, then the external SSD has a lot more value: While PS5 games can’t run off an external drive, the PS5 can do it with last-gen PS4 games. If you have a backlog to clear, putting it on the external isn’t a bad idea.
The recommendation comes with a slight caveat. While the PS5 doesn’t need the faster transfer speeds of the internal SSD to play them, running PS4 games off an external will negate some of the faster load times and performance boosts that you’d normally expect to see running an older game on superior hardware. If you can bear to wait a few extra seconds in load screens, though, this is a great way to free up space on the PS5’s hard drive so you can put more shiny new games on deck.
While the requirements aren’t as strict as the internal SSDs, even external SSDs need to meet a few criteria to properly store PS5 games. It should support USB 3.0 or higher, and have a storage size between 250GB and 8TB. Don’t sweat these requirements. Neither is much of a hurdle. Even if you’re using a 10-year-old SSD that you’ve had for ages, it almost certainly has a USB 3.0 port.
Years ago 128GB was a common capacity for SSDs, but by the 2020s storage had grown cheap enough that 256GB was the entry-level capacity for budget SSDs. These days, it’s more like 500GB. And frankly, you’ll need to use a much larger hard drive if you plan to keep more than a handful of games in storage.
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File size for PS5 games varies massively depending on the title. Major AAA games, such as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Gran Turismo 7, can take up 100-120GB. On the flip side a modest indie game, such as Stray or Hades, could take up less than 10GB. If we use an average game download size of 50 GB, you can get 18 games on a 1GB external drive. That doesn’t leave much room for games’ software patches and expansion packs, though, so I’d say expect the drive to hold 15 games with room to spare.
You’ll get more installs on the 1TB external SSD than the PS5 Disc Edition’s built-in 1TB internal because the latter also contains the system files needed to run the video game console itself. That leaves only 842GB of usable space on the PS5’s internal drive for game installs, patches, and expansion packs. That’s room enough for 16 games (count on 14 with room for patches and expansions). The PS5 Pro has twice the capacity. Earlier PS5s, plus the current PS5 Digital Edition, came with 825GB SSDs. That works out to 667GB of usable space, which can hold 13 50GB games (stick to 11 games).
Remember that, in the end, you don’t need to keep every game you own on your hard drive. Even if you delete it from all your drives, you still “own” the game and can re-download it from the PlayStation Store. Keeping games in cold storage can be convenient, and possibly save you money if your home internet has a data cap, but if you have a fast, reliable internet connection it may be easier to simply download and delete games as you like.
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Matt Jancer has been in the industry for 15 years and lives in his favorite urban death maze, New York City. He’s traded words for money on behalf of more than 15 magazines. Some of his longest-running bylines were spent covering cars, motorcycles, outdoors gear, health and fitness for Car and Driver, Outside, Esquire, Smithsonian, Playboy and Wired. When he’s not writing about motorcycles and our place in the wilderness for a living, he’s writing for enjoyment, riding his motorcycle, and mountain climbing out West. He believes everyone needs at least one hobby they have none of their ego invested into, and so guitar noises and cooking smells have been known to emanate from his apartment. Oh yeah, and he thinks pigeons are way underrated.
Mike Epstein is a Senior Commerce Editor at Hearst Enthusiast Group, producing reviews for buying guides Popular Mechanics, Runner’s World, Bicycling, and Best Products. Prior to joining Hearst, he was a video game and technology critic for over 10 years, with bylines at IGN, Gamespot, Variety, Lifehacker, Kotaku, GamesRadar, Flavorwire and Digital Trends, among others. Now, he’s a jack of all trades, helping reviewers share everything they know about all kinds of technical gear, from snowblowers, to running shoes and bicycles, and every kind of gadget imaginable.
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