How to Expand Your PS5 Storage Space

If you don’t like the idea of opening your PS5, then an external hard drive might be more your speed. These handheld storage devices are far less expensive than SSDs and also generally sport more storage. If you know where to look, $150 can buy you 8 TB of storage. Just plug the HDD into a USB port on the back of the PS5 (not the front) and format it in the Settings menu. Once that’s done, just pick any game you want in your games library, press the options button, select “Move Games and Apps,” and pick the external drive.

Overall, external drives are much less painful than inserting an SSD into a PS5, but even this storage solution comes with caveats. Most notably, you can’t play PS5 games off external drives. These titles require an SSD, so if you transfer them to an HDD, you need to place them back on your console before you can play. Thankfully, this limitation doesn’t extend to PlayStation 4 games. Since you can play these titles off an external drive, if you have a bulky backlog of PS4 titles, you might want to buy an HDD just so you can store them on it and reserve SSD space for PS5 games. Also, make sure that the HDD uses at least SuperSpeed USB 5 Gbps. While some companies produce external SSDs, the PS5 probably can’t run games off them.

PlayStation Plus offers another fairly painless storage solution. The subscription service’s benefits include an additional 100 GB of PS4 saved data and 100 GB of PS5 saved data. It might not be enough to keep you from having to delete a game, but it should be enough to get you out of a small bind.

If worse comes to worst (or you just can’t buy an additional SSD or HDD), and you still need that extra bit of storage space, you can just delete stuff you don’t need. You don’t necessarily have to delete games (although that’s always an option), since you may be able to safely trash optional content in games. Check if that’s an option by highlighting a game, pressing the options button, and selecting Manage Game Content. Alternatively, while exploring your PS5’s storage tab, select any game, choose “Select Items to Delete,” and then scroll down for any games with an icon to their right. Depending on what you find, you might be able to get rid of extraneous modes or content while keeping the main game intact.

While games take up the most storage, they aren’t the only space hogs. The PS5 also has an annoying tendency to record gameplay footage and save it whenever you earn a trophy. These add up over time, but you can turn them off in the Auto-Captures portion of the Captures and Broadcasts settings menu. Then, just delete the ones that your PS5 already saved, and bam, extra storage.