PS5 SSD capacity could be a huge letdown — here's why

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By Roland Moore-Colyer
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PS5 SSD might not give you 825GB of storage — save some money for an upgrade

PS5
(Image credit: Sony)

We’ve heard before that the PS5’s 825GB SSD might have a good chunk of its storage space eaten up by the operating system, but it appears the situation could be worse than first thought. 

Eagle-eyed YouTuber YoungYea spotted that Sony’s official PS5 user interface reveal had a shot of the storage section, which showed only 664GB of available SSD space. With what appears to be no games installed, it would seem like the PS5’s operating system gobbles up around 20 percent of the console's super-fast SSD. 

We need to proceed with some caution here, as the screenshot the YouTuber captured appears to be a console development kit. As such, some storage space could be given over to diagnostic tools and other developer-centric software. Or the development kit PS5 might come with a smaller SSD.  

Given PS5 exclusive games are set to require large amounts of SSD space — Demon’s Souls Remastered is set to require at least 66GB — it would seem very odd for Sony to surrender more than 20GB or so to the PS5’s operating system.

The PS5’s internal storage will be upgradable with off-the-shelf Sony-approved PCIe 4.0 SSDs. But those aren’t readily available yet and are likely to be rather expensive, meaning every gigabyte on the PS5 is likely to be treasured. 

As developers get used to PS5 hardware, they could find ways to reduce the size of their games, say through smart texture and asset compression. But at launch it would appear that the PS5’s 825GB SDD might be mightily fast but also not exactly a vehicle for massive game libraries. 

And the Xbox Series X isn't likely to fare much better here. It’s got a larger but slower 1TB SSD. However, the Xbox One X has a 1TB drive that can fill up rather fast, especially with Xbox Game Pass downloads. So we suspect the same will be true of the Xbox Series X, making the external plug ‘n’ play external SSD an expensive but almost essential upgrade. 

With the Xbox Series X being released November 10 and the PS5 coming out on November 12, we've not got long to wait before we can try out these next-generation games consoles ourselves and see how much storage you really get. 

Roland Moore-Colyer
Roland Moore-Colyer

Roland Moore-Colyer a Managing Editor at Tom’s Guide with a focus on news, features and opinion articles. He often writes about gaming, phones, laptops and other bits of hardware; he’s also got an interest in cars. When not at his desk Roland can be found wandering around London, often with a look of curiosity on his face.