Topic: PS5 - Playing games from an external HD

Hey all, just got a new PS5 and loving it so far! I just had a question that I haven't been able to get a straight answer for, and was wondering if someone here knew or had first hand experience.

I had an external HD for my PS4 that I used to play games off of. The PS5 uses a SSD and therefore I can store PS5 games on my old PS4 HDD but I can't play games off of it (it makes the console copy it back to the internal SSD to run them). While I understand why this is, I was wondering if I got a new external SSD for my PS5, would I be able to play games straight off the drive, rather than have to copy them each time like I do with an old HDD?

Thanks for your help/insight everyone!

You can play ps4 games stored externally, but you can't play ps5 games. You either need to transfer the game back to the ps5 or buy an internal ssd

I believe only PS4 games could be played off an external drive (HDD or SSD) on the PS5, but depending on the speed of the drive will determine the PS4 game's performance. There's no current way to play PS5 games externally and you would need to have an SSD installed internally to play them. All you can do currently is keep them stored on the external drive until then.

@DailyNightly While an SSD is faster than an HDD, the USB connection isn't remotely as fast as the internal NVMe connection, which is why playing PS5 games would still be not an option.
It would load the PS4 games and move PS5 games faster though.

Okay, I appreciate that! Thanks for the help. So there is currently no way to play PS5 games externally?

@DailyNightly No you would need to install a gen four NVME Drive internally. This drive would be additional storage