Compare the marginal cost, not the sticker price. You pay for the controller, board and heatsink once either way, so the extra capacity is close to the cost of the memory alone. Right now the second terabyte costs $93.00 - that is $0.093/GB against $0.153/GB for the 1TB drive itself. With current AAA games commonly around 100 to 200GB installed, a 1TB drive holds about four or five of them.
Prices updated · live figures update every 4-5 hours
Cheapest compliant drive at each tier, and the price of the extra gigabytes on their own.
| Step | Prices | Extra capacity | Marginal cost | vs smaller drive's own $/GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.5TB → 1TB | $89.99 → $152.99 | 500 GB for $63.00 | $0.126/GB | $0.180/GB the extra capacity is 30% cheaper per GB |
| 1TB → 2TB | $152.99 → $245.99 | 1,000 GB for $93.00 | $0.093/GB | $0.153/GB the extra capacity is 39% cheaper per GB |
| 2TB → 4TB | $245.99 → $436.99 | 2,000 GB for $191.00 | $0.096/GB | $0.123/GB the extra capacity is 22% cheaper per GB |
| 4TB → 8TB | $436.99 → $1449.99 | 4,000 GB for $1013.00 | $0.253/GB | $0.109/GB the extra capacity costs more per GB - unusual, check both rows |
| Drive | Capacity | Heatsink | Price | $/GB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| fanxiang S660 PCIe 4.0 500GB NVMe M.2 SSD for PS5 with Heatsink | 500GB | Fitted | $89.99 | $0.180 | Buy |
| Fikwot FX910 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD for PS5&PC | 1TB | Fitted | $152.99 | $0.153 | Buy |
| Crucial P310 2TB SSD | 2TB | Fitted | $245.99 | $0.123 | Buy |
| Fikwot FX660 4TB M.2 SSD | 4TB | Fitted | $436.99 | $0.109 | Buy |
| Lexar 8TB NM790 Internal NVMe SSD, 7000/6200 MB/s | 8TB | Bare | $1449.99 | $0.181 | Buy |
The 1TB recommendation that circulates in most PS5 buying advice was written when games were smaller, and it has not been revisited as often as it should have been.
Current AAA titles commonly install at somewhere around 100 to 200GB, and the largest go considerably beyond that - a headline shooter has been listed at roughly 235GB, which is close to a quarter of a terabyte for one game. Those are approximate figures that move with every patch, and our storage calculator carries per-title estimates with their sources rather than asserting exact numbers that will be stale within weeks.
Set that against the usable capacity of a 1TB drive, which is less than 1,000GB once formatting is accounted for, and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable quickly. Four or five current games can fill it. If your rotation is two or three titles plus a live-service game you never uninstall, 1TB works. If it is anything wider, you will be managing space rather than playing.
GTA 6 is the reason a lot of people are running this calculation right now. Rockstar has not published an install size and we are not going to invent one - our GTA 6 page keeps that framed as an estimate until there is something official. What is safe to say is that it is not going to be small.
Comparing the sticker prices of a 1TB and a 2TB drive is the wrong comparison. The right one is what the extra capacity costs on its own, because that is what you are actually deciding to buy.
Take the cheapest compliant 1TB drive and the cheapest compliant 2TB drive, subtract, and divide by the extra thousand gigabytes. The table above does that live at every capacity step we can price. The resulting figure is almost always well below the per-gigabyte price of the smaller drive - which is another way of saying the first terabyte is expensive and the second is cheap.
That asymmetry is the whole argument. You are paying a fixed cost for the controller, the board, the heatsink and the packaging whether you buy 1TB or 2TB, and the additional capacity is close to the marginal cost of the memory. Buying the smaller drive means paying that fixed cost again later if you outgrow it.
Which points at the real risk of buying small: not that 1TB is bad value today, but that replacing it in a year means buying a second drive rather than upgrading the first. The PS5 has one M.2 slot.
A hard budget is a hard budget. A drive you can buy today beats a better drive you buy in six months, and if the 2TB price is out of reach then the arithmetic above is interesting rather than useful. Buy the 1TB and stop reading.
A narrow rotation genuinely does fit. If you play two or three games at a time, finish them and move on, and you are comfortable moving completed titles to an external drive rather than keeping them installed, 1TB is enough and the extra capacity would sit empty.
A pairing changes it too. A 1TB internal plus a cheap high-capacity external is a legitimate configuration that costs less than a 2TB internal - the internal holds the rotation and the external holds everything finished. Our internal-versus-external page prices that combination.
What does not justify buying 1TB is the sticker price alone. Check the marginal figure above first; on most days it makes the second terabyte look like the cheapest storage on the page.
4TB drives exist, they meet Sony's requirements, and at current prices they frequently carry the lowest cost per gigabyte on the whole page. That makes them the best value by the metric this site usually leads with, and it is worth saying plainly.
It is also a large amount of money in one purchase, and the honest question is whether you will use it. A 4TB drive holds a very large library indeed - considerably more than most people install and leave installed. If you are the kind of buyer who keeps everything and never deletes, it is the correct purchase and the per-gigabyte figure proves it.
If you are not, the money is better spent elsewhere and a 2TB drive plus an external archive covers the same ground for less. Buying capacity you never fill is not good value however good the per-gigabyte number looks.
The table above prices all the tiers together so the comparison is visible rather than assumed.
The PS5 has a single M.2 expansion slot, and that single fact carries more weight in this decision than any per-gigabyte figure.
On a desktop, buying small is a reversible mistake: outgrow the drive and add another. On a PS5 there is nowhere to add one. Outgrowing a 1TB drive means buying a second drive and retiring the first, which means paying the fixed cost of a drive - the controller, the board, the heatsink, the packaging - for a second time. That is the same fixed cost that makes the marginal terabyte look cheap in the table above, and paying it twice is the expensive way to arrive at 2TB.
The reversible version of the mistake is buying too large, and it costs you only the difference. The irreversible version is buying too small and replacing it. Where the two risks are that asymmetric, erring upward is usually right.
The exception is the pairing already described: a 1TB internal plus an external archive is a genuine configuration rather than a compromise, and it does not require the slot to be revisited. If that is your plan, buy the 1TB deliberately rather than as the cheaper option.
Both capacity tiers have been repriced over the past year, and it is worth knowing that the numbers above sit in an unusual market rather than a settled one.
Memory and storage pricing has been under sustained pressure as manufacturing capacity shifted toward products serving AI infrastructure demand, and that pressure has reached consumer drives. Our storage crisis tracker follows the category-level picture with our own figures rather than commentary, and our reports cover how the shift in wafer allocation happened.
The practical consequence for this decision is modest but real: the marginal cost of the second terabyte moves more than it used to, which is why this page computes it live rather than printing a rule. A figure that was true three months ago is not evidence about today.
It also means the advice not to over-buy holds more weight than usual. Capacity you do not need is money spent in a market where the same money buys less than it did.
The storage calculator sizes it against your actual library · the cheapest compliant drives ranks by total cost · deals checks whether today's price is good · GTA 6 storage · the storage crisis tracker covers why both tiers repriced.
It depends on how many games you keep installed. Current AAA titles commonly run around 100 to 200GB and the biggest go beyond that, so a 1TB drive holds roughly four or five current games once formatting overhead is accounted for. A narrow rotation fits comfortably; a wide library does not, and you will spend time managing space.
Far less than the first, and the table above computes it live. Subtract the cheapest compliant 1TB price from the cheapest 2TB price and divide by the extra thousand gigabytes - the result is usually well below the 1TB drive's own per-gigabyte figure, because you pay for the controller, board and heatsink once either way.
4TB drives frequently carry the lowest cost per gigabyte on the page, so by that metric they are the best value. The honest question is whether you will fill it. If you keep everything installed and never delete, it is the right purchase. If not, a 2TB drive plus a cheap external archive covers the same ground for less.
No - the PS5 has one M.2 expansion slot. That is the strongest argument against buying small: outgrowing a 1TB drive means replacing it rather than adding to it, so you pay the fixed cost of a drive twice. An external drive can supplement it, but only as archive for PS5 titles.
Not in any way the console exposes. Sony publishes a sequential read requirement and a compliant drive satisfies it; capacity is a capacity decision rather than a speed one. We do not benchmark drives and would not rank them on figures above the requirement.
Rockstar has not published an install size, so anyone telling you a number is estimating. What is reasonable to assume is that it will be large, and that a 1TB drive already holding several current games will be tight. Our GTA 6 page tracks the situation and keeps the size framed as an estimate until there is an official figure.