Which SSD for GTA 6 on PS5, and when deleting things is cheaper

Grand Theft Auto 6 arrives on 19 November 2026 with preloading from 12 November, and the download's expected to land somewhere between 150 and 200GB. Rockstar hasn't published a figure, so treat that as a working number and not a fact.

A base PlayStation 5 gives you roughly 667GB usable out of its 825GB. Two or three modern shooters and you're out of room. Of all the launch problems, this is the one with a deadline attached, because the 12th is when it stops being hypothetical.

Start here: you might not need to buy anything

The cheapest fix is deleting a game you've finished. It costs nothing, takes about four minutes, and no drive you buy will make launch night any better than just having the space.

Check first. Settings, then Storage. If you've got more than 250GB free you're fine and can stop reading here. If you're under, you've got two weeks to decide, and only then is a drive worth the money.

One thing that catches people out: an external USB drive can't run a PS5 game. It can hold one, so it works as an archive you shuffle titles in and out of, but the game itself has to sit on internal storage to launch. If you've already got a USB drive, use it to park your other games and free up the internal space for this one.

What the PlayStation 5 actually requires

Sony publishes this, and it's a lot stricter than the shelf label on a cheap drive would suggest:

• M.2 NVMe, PCIe Gen4 x4. A Gen3 drive physically fits, and the console rejects it.
• Sequential read of 5,500 MB/s or faster. This is the one most budget drives miss.
• A heatsink. Either built onto the drive or added after. Without one the console won't accept it.
• 250GB to 8TB, in the 2280 length that most drives on the shelf use. Shorter lengths fit too.
• Size limits including the heatsink: up to 25mm wide and 11.25mm thick.

That thickness limit is the trap. Plenty of drives sold with huge aftermarket coolers are excellent in a desktop and won't let you close the PS5's expansion bay. Buy a drive that's sold as PS5 ready, or buy a bare drive and a low profile heatsink to go with it.

Xbox is a different purchase entirely

Series X and Series S don't take M.2 drives at all. They use a proprietary Storage Expansion Card that slots into the back, made by Seagate and Western Digital under licence.

That's simpler, in that there's nothing to specify and nothing to fit wrong. It's also more expensive per gigabyte than an equivalent PlayStation drive, because there's no competing market to push the price down. You're choosing between two capacities, and there are no twenty drives to compare.

Same as on PlayStation, an ordinary external USB drive works for storing Xbox Series games but not for playing them.

What size to get

If you're buying at all, 1TB is the sensible floor and 2TB is the one you won't regret. A 500GB drive holds this game and about one other, which puts you right back where you started within a year.

Don't buy for GTA 6 alone. Buy because you're tired of deleting things, and then this game's just the reason you finally got round to it.

The physical box won't save you any space

This one surprises people every console generation: the boxed edition of GTA 6 holds a download code, not a disc. Buying physical doesn't cut the storage requirement by a single gigabyte. It just means your 200GB download starts when the box arrives.

The rest of the launch night list, in the order it matters, is in the launch checklist. The countdown has the clock for your region.