The available storage space on the PlayStation 5 is already tight for some, and the SSD can fill up quite quickly. The “Other” folder takes up over 100 GB of valuable storage. What is it all about?
Here’s the deal regarding free storage on the PS5: The PlayStation 5 has an ultra-fast SSD. This offers 825 GB of storage, but only 667 GB is available for games and apps. It will be a bit more if you delete the pre-installed Astro’s Playroom on all PS5s.
However, the SSD can still fill up much faster than some would like. Unfortunately, PS5 games cannot be offloaded to external storage media and require the fast PS5 SSD to run at all. But this fast storage cannot currently be expanded. For some, every gigabyte counts. And now some players have noticed a real storage hog that makes free space even tighter than it already is.
The mysterious storage category “Other” – What is it all about?
This has been discovered: As Kotaku reports, some have noticed over time that the data storage of the PS5 has a category or folder that takes up significant storage space. It’s called “Other” and is one of the 4 categories into which the storage of the PlayStation 5 is divided:
- Games and Apps
- Media Gallery
- Saved Data
- Other
What is the problem with this folder? While the first 3 categories have a clear purpose for the storage used, it is not really clear for “Other”.
In the description on the PS5 website, it states
This folder can get quite large. According to Kotaku’s own experiences, it ranged from 40 to more than 125 GB – sometimes without any apparent reason.
However, what the data stored in it is all about and what it is ultimately used for is currently not really clear.
This raises eyebrows: The size of this folder or category actually depends on how many and which games you have on your PS5. Generally speaking: When downloading new games, this folder increases. When you delete them, “Other” gets smaller.
However, the size changes are nonetheless quite confusing. The folder size should vary more significantly when downloading, deleting, or moving PS4 games than with PS5 titles. With PS4 titles, “Other” sometimes changed by more than 10 GB per game. However, with most PS5 games, according to Kotaku, it was never more than 1 GB.
Downloading 2 games – Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition and Sackboy: A Big Adventure even caused “Other” to shrink, while deleting 14 GB of recorded 4K videos caused the folder to grow by more than 4 GB – even though the intended category “Media Gallery” decreased by 14 GB as expected.
What caused even more confusion at Kotaku: After one of the editors had completely deleted all games and apps on his console, “Games and Apps” was only 1.1 GB large. Yet “Other” still claimed more than 16 GB of free storage. Another editor did the same, and “Other” was still 76 GB large for him.
In short: something is wrong here.
What does Sony say about this? According to its own words, Kotaku already requested a statement from Sony on November 16, 2020, but so far it has only said that they are looking into the matter.
How can you reduce “Other”? There aren’t really many options here. Essentially, the only effective way is to get an external hard drive or SSD and offload the PS4 games from the PS5 to it. The impact of PS5 games, however, with a GB here and another there can be neglected.
So while PS4 games may not fully benefit from the direct technical capabilities of the PS5, at least you have more space on your fast PS5 SSD.
By the way, if you’re still worried about whether you’ll be able to get a PlayStation 5: Buy PS5 still in 2020: These retailers will soon accept new orders
