The PlayStation 5 is a massive upgrade over the PlayStation 4 series in various ways. Think of raw processing might, GPU firepower, more memory, and of course, games with next-gen visuals. But there’s one crucial area where the PlayStation 4 reigns functionally supreme over its successor, and that’s the ability to play games directly from a USB extended source.
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The PlayStation 5 can’t pull that off. “PlayStation 5 games can’t be played directly from USB extended storage,” says an official Sony PlayStation support page. Why the disparity, especially considering the fact that the PlayStation 5 is one mighty computing and graphics-crunching machine? Well, it has to do with the speed of the storage device for your games.
Right now, you can move games stored on your PlayStation’s internal SSD drive to an external storage unit. However, you can’t directly download games to external storage devices. It’s a necessary evil that you need to tolerate and get used to frequent to-and-fro game file transfer. Every time you install a game with a massive file size, you need to clear up the internal storage, install the game locally, and then move it to the external storage.
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