Every year the same thing happens: people spend Black Friday on a chair they did not need while their console sits at 96% capacity. Storage is the least exciting category in gaming and it is comfortably the best thing to buy during this week.
It is also the category where discounts are most reliably genuine, because flash memory is a commodity and the pricing is not built on inflated list prices the way peripherals are.
Before you buy anything: free what you have
The cheapest gigabytes are the ones already on your drive.
- Uninstall anything untouched in 90 days. Purchases and saves stay in your account. Reinstalling costs download time and nothing else. One abandoned shooter often solves half the problem.
- Move rather than delete. Both consoles let you shift games to cheap external drives and pull them back later. An inexpensive USB drive is a legitimate solution for a library you are not actively playing.
- Then buy. If you still need space after those two steps, you genuinely need space.
What to buy, by platform
| Platform | What it takes | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| PlayStation 5 | M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen4 with a heatsink | Sony specifies a minimum read speed and requires heat dissipation. Buy a drive with the heatsink pre-fitted — it is easier and usually barely more expensive. Installation is one screw and about five minutes |
| Xbox Series X|S | Proprietary expansion card | More expensive per gigabyte than the PS5 route with no way around it. Series S owners will almost certainly need one |
| Switch 2 | microSD Express | A faster and pricier format than standard microSD. Old Switch cards do not carry over for game storage |
| PC | Any Gen4 M.2 NVMe | The most competitive and cheapest of the four. Gen5 drives are generally wasted money for gaming |
The GTA 6 pressure
Grand Theft Auto VI launched November 19 with a very large install — Rockstar has not published an official size, and we do not publish estimates — plus a day-one patch on top. A single modern AAA open-world game can consume a substantial fraction of a base console's usable space, and most people have been filling those drives for years.
Our platform-specific guidance for that specifically is in GTA 6 storage: what to buy.
How to judge a storage deal
What works
- Compare price per gigabyte, not headline price — it is the only comparable number
- Prefer drives with pre-fitted heatsinks for PS5; it removes a fiddly step
- Stick to established manufacturers — this is not a category to experiment in
- Buy the capacity you will need in two years, not the one you need today
What doesn't
- Ignore sequential read speeds far above the platform requirement — you will not notice them
- Do not buy Gen5 drives for a PS5 or a gaming PC; the money goes nowhere
- Avoid unbranded cards with implausible specifications, particularly in the microSD space
- Do not buy an external USB drive expecting to run current-gen games from it — it works for storage and transfer, not play
Our full year-round storage guidance is in the 2026 storage expansion guide.