PlayStation has announced a raft of improvements to the PS5 in its new April update. First and foremost amongst those is improved storage flexibility, but there’s still no sign of the SSD expansion feature promised at launch.
The new update will let PS5 owners transfer titles off their internal SSD drive onto external USB drives, effectively parking them to free up space, with the idea that they will be quicker to reinstall from there than from download. Something that the Xbox Series consoles already support, but is useful on PS5 too, given its relatively limited storage space.
However, that did not come alongside the much-anticipated support M.2 SSD drives, allowing for seamless expansion of the internal storage, with games able to run directly from such drives. Instead work continues and news will come in a future blog post.
While unprove, one theory is that a lack of storage space might put purchasers off buying additional games, as their hard disks are already packed with regular-play titles such as Fortnite or Warzone.
The Xbox Series consoles do have a Seagate-branded official expansion, at around £200 it’s a pricey upgrade. It’s hoped that generic M.2 support for PS5 will bring a competitive market and prices should be significantly lower.
Elsewhere, Spony has enabled Game Update Pre-Downloads, so updates for games will download while the console is in rest mode, as you’d expect, so games will be playable from the moment the console is powered up.
Sony has added improved social features between PS4 and PS5 consoles, allowing easier joining of friend’s games sessions and cross-generation Share Play, so PS4 players can see and try out games running on a friend’s PS5 console.