It’s been known for a while that the PS5 will allow off-the-shelf NVMe SSD expansions as long as they’re certified, while Sony also showed off dedicated slot for the same in their PS5 teardown video. However, it seems SSD expansions won’t be supported by the console right out the gate.
In a statement to The Verge, Sony confirmed that external SSD expansions at launch, and that the same is being “reserved for a future update.” It’s more than likely that this is the case due to there not being any SSDs out on the market that are certified for this, meaning that an SSD that is fast enough to support the PS5 (which is supposedly the fastest SSD currently in existence) simply isn’t available on the market. Sony has indicated the same on a few occasions in the past, so this doesn’t come across as much of a surprise.
From Demon’s Souls to Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, we’ve seen quite few examples of games having large install sizes on the PS5. The console, which has an 825 GB SSD, only has about 664 GB of actual useable storage space, so hopefully, those SSD expansions won’t be too far out.
Meanwhile, it’s also been confirmed that PS5 games cannot be installed on external HDDs.