External storage for PS5: what actually works
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PS5 storage confuses people because there are two completely different kinds of expansion and they do different jobs.
USB drives
An external USB 3.0 drive - hard disk or SSD - connects to the back of the console and does two things. It plays PS4 games directly, and it stores PS5 games without running them. If your library is mostly PS4 titles, or you simply want somewhere to park PS5 games you are not currently playing so you do not have to re-download 80GB later, this is the cheap and completely adequate answer.
Internal NVMe
To actually run a PS5 game from expanded storage, it has to be an internal M.2 NVMe drive fitted in the console's expansion bay. The console demands a certain sustained speed, and a heatsink is required.
Which do you need?
- Mostly PS4 games, or archiving - a USB drive is enough
- Playing PS5 games from the expansion - it must be internal NVMe
- Both - many people run a USB drive for archive and an NVMe for active games
A note on speed
A USB hard disk is slower to load than a USB SSD, but for PS4 games the difference is modest and the cost per terabyte is much lower. For pure archiving, a spinning drive is the sensible buy.
See storage and the PlayStation 5 accessories page.