How to Back Up PS5 Games to an External Drive

The PlayStation 5 comes standard with a pretty meager 667GB of available storage, but you don’t have to keep deleting and re-downloading your PS5 games as long as you have a USB hard drive handy.

USB Storage Requirements

Most USB hard drives and SSDs work as extended storage for a PS5. However, you must meet some minimum requirements:

• Size between 250GB and 8TB.
• USB 3 with at least 5 Gbit/s throughput.
• The drive cannot be connected through a hub; This includes drives with an integrated hub that are internally cabled through the hub.

When you connect your drive to the PS5 for the first time, you will need to format it as extended storage. Go to Settings > Storage > USB Extended Storage > Format as USB Extended Storage.

You can play PS4 games via USB

USB Extended Storage can be used to play PS4 games directly. There is no need for these games to take up space on your PS5’s internal SSD. However, some PS4 games benefit from the increased speed of the internal SSD, just not to the same extent as native PS5 games.

As a compromise, you can consider using an external SSD for PS4 games, which benefit from the SSD speeds delivered via USB but are wasted on the hyper-fast internal SSD. Open world games such as Assassin’s Creed Origins are prime examples.

Since the maximum speed of the USB ports on the PS5 is still many times slower than the internal SSD, it doesn’t matter how fast the drive you plug in externally is. PS5 games cannot be played from USB storage.

Moving games to an external drive

While PS5 games cannot be played from a USB drive, you can archive your PS5 games to an external drive. If you want to play the game again, you can simply copy it back from the external hard drive to the internal SSD.

Go to your game library and highlight the PS5 game that you want to move to extended storage

Press the Options button on your controller, then select Move games and apps.

Next, select “Move”.

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Confirm the transfer with “OK”.

After the move is complete, you can find the game in your game library. To play it, select the game from your library and choose “Copy”.

Even if you have gigabit fiber, copying games locally from USB storage is much faster and more reliable than downloading from the Internet. External mechanical USB hard drives are inexpensive per GB, so you can easily store a large PS5 library of titles.

While the PS5 doesn’t support connecting multiple expanded storage drives at the same time, you can switch between drives. So having one drive for archiving PS5 games and another for gaming is a possible solution. Or you can keep your game archives and live PS4 games on one giant hard drive.

Expanding the internal storage of the PS5

Moving PS5 titles to and from external storage is an inexpensive solution that will suit most PS5 owners. However, if your console is shared by many players or you have certain games more or less permanently installed on the internal SSD, this is less practical.

The PS5 features an SSD expansion slot that accepts an M.2 SSD. Inserting a drive into this expansion slot expands the console’s internal storage. You can use the storage space on this drive in the same way as the internal SSD, meaning you can play PS5 games directly on it.

In theory, any Gen4 M.2 drive that physically fits in the bay will work as long as it has a sequential read speed of 5500MB/s. However, the SSD must have a heatsink, which in many cases must be purchased separately.

At the time of writing, the only officially licensed SSD is the WD Black SN850, which is reasonably priced and available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities. Just follow our SSD installation instructions.