GTA 6 Storage: The PS5 and Xbox SSD Upgrades You Need Before November

Introduction

Here is the least glamorous and most reliable prediction about November 19, 2026: a very large number of people are going to sit down to play Grand Theft Auto VI and spend the first hour of it deleting other games.

🚗 This guide is part of the Dadnology GTA Hub — every mainline Grand Theft Auto ranked, the road to GTA 6, and the honest parents’ guide.

That is not a jab at anyone’s housekeeping. It is arithmetic. Consoles ship with drives sized for the era they launched in, modern games have grown considerably since, and GTA 6 is a download on every single platform — even the boxed copy Amazon sells is a code in a box that delivers on November 12 and unlocks on the 19th. There is no disc to play from. Whatever this game turns out to weigh, it has to fit.

This guide is for the dad who has not opened his console in years and has no intention of becoming a hardware person. It covers what the PS5 actually requires, why the Xbox route costs roughly double, and what to buy so the job takes five minutes in October instead of ruining a Thursday evening in November. If you are looking for drives to carry family photos and 4K video around, that is a different problem and we have a separate portable SSD and storage guide for it — this one is strictly about making room inside the console.

How Big Is GTA 6, Actually?

Nobody outside Rockstar knows, and this is worth being straight about because a lot of pages will happily tell you a number.

Rockstar has not published a final installation size. What we can do is look at the same studio’s own recent history: GTA V occupies roughly 100GB on current consoles, and Red Dead Redemption 2 lands around 150GB. GTA 6 is a substantially more ambitious game than either, arriving at the end of a console generation rather than the start of one, and it will ship with a day-one patch like everything else does.

So the planning number is not a number, it is a rule: assume this game will want more space than anything else on your console, and buy the upgrade that means you never have to think about it again. In practice that means 2TB rather than 1TB on a PS5, where the price difference is far smaller than the annoyance of doing this twice.

The PS5 Route: Standard Parts, Five Minutes, Done

The good news for PlayStation 5 owners is that Sony used a standard slot. Any M.2 drive that meets the spec works, which means an actual market with actual competition.

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WD_BLACK SN850P 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD (Officially Licensed for PS5) (opens in a new tab)

The zero-research PS5 pick: officially licensed, heatsink already fitted, correct height out of the box.

The requirements, exactly, so you can check any drive you are looking at:

• Type: M.2 NVMe SSD, PCIe Gen4 x4
• Form factor: 2280 (the common size — the number is the length in millimetres)
• Speed: sequential read of at least 5,500 MB/s
• Cooling: a heatsink is required, and the total height of drive plus heatsink must not exceed 11.25mm

Two of those trip people up. The speed floor rules out a lot of perfectly good budget drives — a cheap Gen4 SSD that reads at 3,500 MB/s is not eligible, however attractive the price. And the height limit means you cannot simply buy any drive and any heatsink and hope; buy a model sold with its heatsink already fitted and the problem does not exist.

One thing you can safely ignore: PCIe Gen5. Gen5 drives are backwards compatible and will work, but the PS5 cannot use the extra speed, so you would be paying a premium for nothing. This is the single easiest way to overspend on this upgrade.

The pick

The WD_BLACK SN850P is the officially licensed PlayStation drive, which in practice means somebody else has already done the compatibility homework. Heatsink fitted, height correct, speed comfortably over the floor. At 2TB it roughly triples a standard PS5’s usable space and ends this conversation for the rest of the console’s life.

The Samsung 990 PRO heatsink model is the equally sensible alternative and is frequently the cheaper of the two depending on the week. Both are the right answer; buy whichever is discounted when you look.

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Samsung 990 PRO 2TB with Heatsink (opens in a new tab)

The alternative if it is cheaper on the day - same class of drive, heatsink model, PS5 operation verified.

Installing it

This is genuinely a five-minute job and it does not void the warranty — Sony designed the bay to be opened. Power down fully and unplug, pop off the side panel, undo one screw on the expansion bay cover, seat the drive at an angle and lay it flat, secure it with the mounting screw, put the cover and panel back. The console formats the drive on the next boot and asks whether you would like to move games onto it.

If you have ever changed a laptop’s RAM, this is easier. If you have never opened a piece of hardware in your life, it is still easier, because there are only two screws and neither of them is hidden.

The Xbox Route: One Option, Twice the Price

Xbox Series X owners have a simpler decision and a worse one. Microsoft used a proprietary expansion card format rather than a standard slot, so there is no open market and no bargain to find.

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Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X|S (1TB) (opens in a new tab)

The original Xbox expansion card. There is no cheaper route to internal Xbox storage - the format is proprietary.

The upside is that installation is trivial — the card slots into the back of the console like a memory card, with no panel to remove and nothing to screw in. It takes about fifteen seconds and works immediately.

The downside is the price per terabyte. A 1TB Xbox expansion card typically costs roughly what a 2TB PS5 M.2 drive does. That is not a temporary market condition, it is what a closed format does. If you are still deciding between consoles, this is a real part of the cost that never appears on the shelf price, and it is worth adding to the sticker difference before you commit.

There are now several certified cards from Seagate, WD and SanDisk. They perform identically because the specification is fixed by Microsoft, so buy on price alone. The Seagate 1TB card is the original and the most widely stocked; the WD_BLACK C50 at 512GB is the cheap entry point, but be realistic that 512GB is one big modern game plus change — it is a stopgap, not a solution, and for GTA 6 specifically it is cutting things fine.

What About a Cheap External Drive?

Worth understanding, because it is half a solution and the half it solves is genuinely useful.

On both consoles, a plain USB drive can store current-generation games but cannot run them. You copy a game back to internal storage to play it. So an external drive does not help you play GTA 6 — but it is an excellent, cheap parking space for the eight other games currently occupying your console. Moving your library out to USB is much faster than re-downloading it later, and an ordinary external SSD costs a fraction of an expansion card.

The realistic setup for a household that plays a handful of games: internal storage for what is being played right now, a cheap external drive as the shelf for everything else. That works on both consoles and it is the answer if the expansion card price is genuinely off the table.

The Free Option, Because It Is Sometimes the Right One

Before spending anything, it is worth saying plainly: the cheapest fix for a full console is deleting games you have finished, and for a lot of households that is genuinely enough.

Two things make this less painful than people assume. Your saves are not stored with the game — they sit in cloud storage and in the console’s own save area, so deleting a finished game and reinstalling it in two years puts you back exactly where you stopped. And every digital purchase stays in your library permanently; deleting is not giving up, it is unloading.

So go through the console honestly. The sports title from two seasons ago, the co-op game you played through once, the 90GB shooter nobody has opened since spring. On most family consoles there is 200GB of that sitting there, which is likely more than GTA 6 will ask for.

The case for buying a drive anyway is that this is a chore you will repeat every few months as long as the console is tight on space, and it always comes due at the worst moment. But if money is the constraint rather than convenience, an afternoon of tidying costs nothing and works. We would rather tell you that than sell you a drive you did not need.

The Family Reality: Do It in October

The reason this guide exists in September rather than November is that storage is the one part of launch night that is entirely within your control and entirely predictable.

Preload opens November 12, a week before the game unlocks. That week is the difference between playing on Thursday evening and watching a progress bar on Thursday evening, and on ordinary home broadband with a game this size it is not a small margin. But a preload needs somewhere to land. A console with 40GB free on November 12 gets none of that head start, and you will discover this at exactly the moment it is least convenient.

There is also a quieter argument for doing it early. If there are kids in the house, this console is shared, and “I need to delete your games to install mine” is a conversation that goes better in October when nobody is excited than on launch night when everybody is. The same applies to the bigger conversation the game itself brings with it — our honest parents’ guide to GTA 6 covers the Mature 17+ rating and what it actually means in a family house.

Buy the drive now, fit it on a quiet Sunday, move your library across, and forget about it. It costs the same money in September as it does in a panic in November.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

How big is GTA 6 going to be?

Rockstar has not published a final installation size, so anyone quoting an exact number is guessing. For context from the same studio: GTA V runs roughly 100GB on current consoles and Red Dead Redemption 2 around 150GB. Plan for at least that, assume day-one patches on top, and you will not be caught out.

What SSD does a PS5 need?

An M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen4 x4 drive in the 2280 form factor, with a sequential read speed of at least 5,500 MB/s, fitted with a heatsink. The drive plus heatsink must be no taller than 11.25mm. A PCIe Gen5 drive will work but gives you no benefit on a PS5, so there is no reason to pay for one.

Can I just use an external USB hard drive instead?

Partly. On both consoles a USB drive can store current-generation games but cannot run them - you copy them back to internal storage to play. That is still useful as a parking space for your other games, and much cheaper. But the game you are actively playing has to live on internal storage or an official expansion card.

Why are Xbox storage upgrades so much more expensive?

Because Xbox uses a proprietary expansion card rather than a standard M.2 slot, so there is no open market driving the price down. A 1TB Xbox card typically costs roughly what a 2TB PS5 M.2 drive does. It is the hidden cost of the platform and it is worth factoring into a console decision before you buy.

Is installing a PS5 SSD difficult?

No. It is one panel, one screw, and about five minutes with a normal Phillips screwdriver - no soldering, no thermal paste, and it does not void the warranty. Buy a drive with the heatsink already attached and there is nothing to assemble.

Do I need to do this before launch day?

Do it before November 12, which is when the preload opens. That head start on the download is worth having, and it disappears if the console has no room. Sorting storage in October costs the same money and none of the launch-night frustration.