PS5 Will Reportedly Add Internal Storage Space Upgrade This Summer

It appears you'll finally get the chance to expand your storage space on PS5 this summer, if the latest report we've seen is accurate. A firmware update will give players to upgrade the storage space in the console by making use of an expansion slot. This will let them store and play more PS5 games. A concern over temperature could have been what delayed the feature until then.

According to Bloomberg, a firmware update will enable use of the M.2 SSD expansion slot by allowing the internal fans to run at a higher speed. Overheating concerns were a factor in not enabling the slot at launch, and you cannot play or store PS5 games on an external drive. These more-traditional external drives can be used for storing and playing PS4 games, but users (including me) have seen issues with the console hard-crashing with the drives plugged in.

You'll want to wait until Sony releases a list of officially approved NVMe SSD units before you make a purchase, as they're still quite expensive, and not every model will work. They need to be able to run as quickly as the permanent drive installed in the system, which is how the PS5 is able to load games so quickly, and they also need to physically fit in the slot. The Xbox Series X|S uses a similar drive, but it also comes with a proprietary expansion slot that was enabled on launch day. Currently, only Seagate makes the drive, but that could change.

Game file sizes are certainly becoming more of an issue, as they continue to rise while storage capacity on consoles has stayed relatively stagnant. The PS5 comes with an 825GB SSD, but only about 667GB are usable. The PS4 Pro, which released four years earlier, has 1TB of storage, though it was with a traditional hard drive and thus significantly less expensive.

If you have a 500GB model PS4, for instance, you may no longer be able to have fully updated versions of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Warzone with Modern Warfare on the system at the same time.