[Video Included] PS5 Storage Expansion – Break the 825GB Limit

Need help with PS5 storage upgrade!

“Hey guys, recently I bought a PS5 console. I had been so excited but it didn’t last for long. Later, I found the storage was rather insufficient – the PS5 came with only 825GB SSD in which only 667.2GB was free space. As far as I’m concerned, the latest Call of Duty Cold War with Warzone takes up nearly 200GB which means I can’t store many titles on the console. I inserted a large SSD into the storage expansion slot but it couldn’t be recognized by the console. Does anybody know why or how I can fix it?

Why PS5 couldn’t recognize your internal SSD?

PlayStation 5 (PS5) is Sony’s fifth-general video game console released on Nov 12, 2020 as the successor to PS4. PS5 is so popular that Sony says that PS5 had 8.6 million monthly active users in March 2021. I own a PS5 too and I love the initial titles so much like Ratchet and Clank and Spiderman Miles.

How much storage does a PS5 have? Although PS5 deserves to be the greatest video game console in recent years, it does have a limit. As we all know, PS5 comes with only 825GB SSD storage in which there’s only 667.2GB usable. It seems to be large at the first sight but you do need to know, the PS5 titles are literally too large to hold, for example, Black Ops Cold War with Warzone, which takes up to nearly 200GB.

[Video] PS5 Storage extension – plug a new SSD into the slot

To handle those large-sized games, many users choose to open the case, and plug a bigger SSD into the console as what they have done with PS4 and PS4Pro. To do that, the external drive must have a PCie 4.0 interface with at list 5.5GB/s transfer speed which will take full advantage of the PS5’s hardware speed.

Here, you can see how to perform PS5 storage expansion by adding an SSD to the SSD slot from the video tutorial:

PS5 storage expansion – connect it with an external HDD

As mentioned above, you can plug an SSD into a PS5 for storage extension. However, some people may think it too complex to open the case with a screwdriver and be worried about that it may cause damages. Moreover, some people find the SSD is too expensive compared with an HDD of the same size and don’t want to spend more money on it. Thus, there’s another option for PS5 storage upgrade – connect an external HDD to your PS5.

Note: In this way, you can only move backwards compatible PS4 games from a PS5 to the external hard drive.

Part 1. Automatically install PS4 games to the external HDD

If you don’t want to store the old PS4 games on your PS5 anymore, then, you can try changing the default install location into the new HDD. Before starting, you have to format the hard drive for use on PS5.

Go to Settings > Storage > Extend Storage > Format As Extended Storage.

After completed, enable the “Always install PS4 games to Extended” option if you want to automatically install all PS4 games to your external HDD.

Part 2. Move existing PS4 games to the external HDD

If you already have some PS4 games installed on the PS5 console, then, select Console Storage > Game and Apps > Items You Can Move. Tick the games you want to transfer to the external HDD and hit the “Move” button.

Bonus: How to move all games from PS4 to a new SSD?

If you want to transfer all games from PS4 to a new SSD so that you can directly plug it into the PS5 slot later or just in the hope of upgrading PS4 hard drive, then, you won’t want to miss the tutorial below. To make the game transfer between 2 hard drives, this time, I recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard – a powerful and multifunctional disk manager.

With this software, you can clone all data including games and apps from one hard drive to another within only several steps. Moreover, this freeware supports wiping hard drive as well if you want to sell your PS4 or PS5 but want to make sure there won’t be privacy info leakage.

Free download the most impressive disk management utility to have a try!

Step 1. Connect both the SSD and the PS4’s internal hard drive to a computer. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard and wait until both hard drives are recognized.

Step 2. Open the installed AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, click "Clone" in the main interface, and select "Clone Disk".

Step 3. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk like SSD and click "Next".

Step 4. Select the destination disk to store the data on the source disk, and then click "Next".

Step 5. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to "Sector to Sector clone", and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to Optimize the performance of SSD if the target disk is an SSD drive. 

Tip: If you want to clone Windows to a smaller drive, the "Clone without resizing partitions"  button will be greyed out. Then, a Note about how to boot OS from the destination disk will pop up. Read and keep it in mind.

Step 6. After returning to the main interface, check the pending operation and click "Apply" and "Proceed" to commit the operation.

In a few seconds, all data on the old PS4 HDD will be transferred to the new SSD.

Conclusion

What is the right way for PS5 storage expansion? In this tutorial, you learnt that the best way is to add an SSD to the hard drive slot or connect an external HDD with the console. Then, in the final part of the post, I explained how to move all games from a PS4 to a new SSD with third-party software AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. It’s totally free. However, if you want to try other features like app mover or free space allocation, please upgrade it to the professional edition.