Jay Versluis
patreon
What is PS5 Console Exclusive Storage (and how to remove it)
🕑 Added 2023-07-20 15:21:24 +0000 UTCHello folks! Today I have a quick video about the Playstation 5 for you. The reason is a bit of a longer story, so bear with me.
I've recently invested into a couple of SanDisk USB 3.2 sticks I wanted to use as external storage, with the intention of comparing read speeds between USB 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2. That was supposed to be the video.
By accident though, Amazon didn't send me the 3.1 version and I ended up two 3.2 versions of the sticks. What a nice surprise I thought! Turns out read speed is terrible on both drives, so I may end up returning them for a refund. I used one drive to install PS4 games onto, but the thing went bust and it lost all its data so I had to re-format it. No biggie really, and there was no data loss.
Turns out though, when this problem happens, the PS5 retains some of the game's data on its internal hard drive and assumes I have just unplugged the stick, waiting for me to put it back so it can play the game. There's no option to re-install the game if the data on the USB is gone for good, nor is there an obvious option to remove the residual. Google turned up limited to no results. It took me a while to figure out a workaround, so that turned out to be the video: getting to the bottom of the mysterious Console Exclusive Data, and how to re-install a game that no longer exists on USB storage.
Enjoy!
I have a three-part mini series in German ready to go, stay tuned for that in the next post.
In other news, our moving plans are still somewhat up in the air. Our landlady has found a way to not sell our current apartment, which means for now we can stay - but for how long, and if we actually want to do this is another matter. We're still thinking about the next steps, but the time pressure is off for now.
More news as it breaks!
Comments
Jay Versluis
It's quite the science! The internal PS5 drive is incredibly fast, some kind of alien technology or so I'm told 👾 Sadly it's not very big (just under 1TB), and PS5 games require games to be installed there, or to a Gen4 M2 drive. USB drives can be used to install and play PS4 games to/from, and literally any drive will work. There are two ways to format it: regular exFAT type file system to store video clips and screenshots, and "extended storage" that's recognised as a partition that holds game data. When I tried using an older USB3 stick I had, I didn't notice the difference - but with these cheaper USB 3.2 drives, load speeds are literally terrible. In the end I bought an EVO 980 Pro and expanded my storage that way. Now I have an additional 2TB to install both PS4 and PS5 games. I'll do more testing with the USB sticks on my PC, perhaps I'll get some use out of them there. Good luck with the Xbox adventure, I hope it goes well. The stuff we need to know just to play video games these days is quite mind-boggling 😄
Shannon St. Claire
Interesting. I've done some reading about playing Xbox games on the Series X via USB but they seem to be rather persnickety, to say the least. I'll be interested in seeing how things turn out with the PS5.
