With an 825GB SSD, every gigabyte of space on your PS5 is precious. That's why you don't want to waste it with PS4 games, especially when PS5 games need to be played from their internal SSD. To make your lives easier so that you don't have to constantly transfer games back and forth, you can set an external hard drive as your default drive for PS4 game downloads. Doing so is easy, and it should save you a lot of time. It may not be as fast as the PS5's SSD, but an external drive can play PS4 games just fine.
- Turn on your PS5.
- Plug in a compatible external hard drive into one of the back USB Type-A ports (the front USB port will not work because it is not Superspeed).
- Go to Settings.
- Select Storage.
- Select USB Extended Storage.
- Toggle on Always Install PS4 Games to USB Extended Storage.
Can I select a default hard drive for PS5 games?
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like you can select a default hard drive for PS5 games at this time. While a recent update finally made it possible to store PS5 games on an external drive, they can still only be played from the internal SSD. If you need to transfer PS5 games between the internal drive and an external one, you can move them individually or in bulk. Thankfully, you won't have to break the bank on some of the best external drives and SSDs for PS5. You can grab some for under $100.
We'd recommend an external SSD since those are faster, but an HDD works fine as well (and is usually cheaper, anyway). As long as it connects through USB and has a capacity of at least 250GB at minimum, you should be good.
Make it faster with an SSD
Need to save space on your PS5? Don't download your PS4 games to its internal SSD. An external drive is what you want for those instances, and there's plenty of backward compatible games to play.
