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 is expected to be somewhere between 150 and 200GB. Rockstar has published no figure, so treat that as a working number rather than a fact.

A base PlayStation 5 gives you roughly 667GB usable out of its 825GB. Two or three modern shooters and you do not have room. This is the one launch problem with a deadline attached, because the 12th is when it stops being hypothetical.

Start here: you may not need to buy anything

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

Check first. Settings, then Storage. If you are above 250GB free you are fine and can stop reading. If you are under, you have two weeks to decide, and only then is a drive worth the money.

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

What the PlayStation 5 actually requires

Sony publishes this, and it is stricter than the shelf label on a cheap drive suggests:

• M.2 NVMe, PCIe Gen4 x4. A Gen3 drive physically fits and is rejected.
• 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. Without one the console will not 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 enormous aftermarket coolers are excellent in a desktop and will not close the PS5's expansion bay. Buy a drive sold as PS5 ready, or buy a bare drive and a low profile heatsink.

Xbox is a different purchase entirely

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

It is simpler, in that there is nothing to specify and nothing to fit wrongly. It is also more expensive per gigabyte than an equivalent PlayStation drive, because there is no competing market. You are choosing between two capacities, not comparing twenty drives.

As on PlayStation, an ordinary external USB drive works for storing Xbox Series titles but not for playing them.

What size to get

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

Do not buy for GTA 6 alone. Buy because you are tired of the deleting, and then this game is simply the reason you finally did it.

The physical box does not save you

Worth stating because it surprises people every generation: the boxed edition of GTA 6 holds a download code rather than a disc. Buying physical does not reduce 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 runs against your own timezone.