When the PS5 was announced last summer, alarm bells were ringing when it was announced that the base gaming console would have a mere 825GB of internal storage space.

This translates to only 667GB after the OS and critical systems occupy the available memory, and given that it is not uncommon for major games to require 100GB or more to be installed, a hard drive of this size is very unlikely to make it!

My concern.

My concerns were further magnified by the hard drive headaches I experienced with the 1TB PS4 Pro. I regularly had to make difficult decisions about which games to delete from my system for new releases, and the fact that the PS5 had an even smaller drive when it came out of the box frustrated me even before I put the console under the TV.

However, despite my pre-launch concerns, I have owned the PS5 for six months now and have had a surprisingly smooth experience regarding the size of the hard drive. This week was the first time since launch that I was told "your hard drive is full" when trying to install a game, but even so, it was a very easy process to free up more space.

Thanks to the PS5's super-fast SSD and the smart tricks game developers can do, I hardly noticed that the PS5 has, at least on paper, a rather small hard drive by modern standards.

The first insight into the PS5 came from a deep-dive presentation given by Sony's Mark Cerny in March 2020. In a relatively dry showcase of the console's architects, Cerny described the technology behind the next-generation PlayStation and expanded on its key features.

He spoke at length about how the inclusion of SSD drives would be a huge leap forward compared to the HDD drives that were standard on the PS4; Cerny explained that the increased loading speed would allow developers to duplicate assets and load objects in the background without He explained that the increased loading speed will eliminate the need for developers to employ previously necessary programming tricks, such as duplicating assets or intentionally stopping the player's progress in order to load objects in the background.

Certainly, being able to jump into a game like "Spider-Man: Miles Morales" with virtually zero loading screens is great, but SSDs also allow developers to significantly compress the file size of their games.

Control: Ultimate Edition is a good example: on the Xbox Series X (which uses SSD drives but is slower than the PS5), the game is 42 GB in size, while on the PS5 it is only 25 GB. The underwater survival game Subnautica is 15 GB on PS4, but only 5 GB on PS5. These are just two of dozens of examples.

In fact, according to our sister site Tom's Hardware, PS5 file sizes are regularly about 60% smaller thanks to this compression technology. Sony has internally named this technology "Kraken," which seems appropriate for a very powerful feature.

By giving developers the power to significantly reduce the file size of a game, it compensates for the PS5's relatively small hard drive, allowing them to work on multiple games at once without the headache of repeatedly downloading, deleting, and re-downloading.

The first major update to the PS5 console, released in April, also added a long-awaited feature: the ability to save PS5 games to an external hard drive. This also made the PS5's hard drive seem even larger.

Unfortunately, you cannot play native PS5 games directly from the external drive (PS4 games can be played this way), but you can use the drive as temporary storage. If you want to actually play the games, you can put the games back on the internal SSD.

Unfortunately, transferring games is not immediate. On my PS5, it took 14 minutes and 42 seconds to transfer "Marvel's Avengers" (file size 80.52 GB) from the external drive to the PS5 SSD (16 minutes and 34 seconds for the reverse transfer). However, this process is much faster than re-downloading the entire game, which would still take at least an hour even with my there solid internet.

Because of the usefulness of this feature, I currently have a 2TB drive permanently connected to my PS5. I use this drive to store PS4 games and next-gen titles that I don't want to delete completely but aren't in my current rotation of games I'm playing.

If you are looking for an external hard drive for PS5, be sure to check out our best selection of external hard drives for PS5.

While the PS5's compression technology is great and the ability to store games on an external drive is useful, in the long run Sony needs to provide players with a way to expand the PS5's core memory.

Games like "Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War" (170 GB without Warzone installed) and "NBA 2K21" (122 GB) already take up nearly half of the PS5's SSD, and previous generation games will take up almost half of the PS4/Xbox One's capacity has grown even larger since its launch.

Seagate now offers an officially licensed 1TB storage expansion card for the Xbox Series X, which doubles the console's storage. 10]

Sony claims that additional independently licensed storage options will be available in the near future.

In the future, as more next-generation games are released and my library of PS5 games grows ever larger, I will no doubt want a larger hard drive for my PS5, but for now at least, I'm not sure how far Sony has stretched the 825GB. I am shocked and impressed by how well they have managed to do this.