There's no way to move PS5 games off the SSD

Continuing our PlayStation 5 review process, Digital Foundry today presents a guided tour of the excellent new user interface, exploring the menu system and new functionality - and it was during the recording of this video that a couple of inconvenient issues came to light. The big one is this: right now, there seems to be no way of copying PS5 games away from the main system storage, presenting problems when the SSD is full. In this scenario, the only way to install new games is to delete old ones, meaning that to play them again you'll need to re-download them - deleting other installed PS5 games in the process. PlayStation 4 games installed to PS5 are not affected - these can be moved off to external USB storage.

In common with the Xbox Series consoles, next generation games for PS5 can only be run from internal storage (or the 1TB expansion card, in the case of the Microsoft consoles) and thus far, Sony has not whitelisted any third-party M.2 NVMe drives for extra solid state drive space. However, the difference here is Xbox consoles allow for all games old and new to be archived off to external storage. You can't run next-gen games from there, but at least you can shuttle the titles to and from internal storage without having to re-download them. This does not appear to be a viable solution for PS5.

To test this, we filled PS5's 667GB of available storage with PS4 games, then attempted to install a new PS5 title. The system asks we free up space, exactly as you would expect - and the only way to do that with PS5 game data would be to delete it. In an era where games routinely break the 100GB barrier, this presents problems and we really hope to see Sony address this as a matter of urgency.

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