Can you play or pre-load GTA 6 from an external drive?

Can you play GTA 6 on PS5 from a USB drive?

Going by Sony’s general rules, no. Its USB extended storage page, which we read on November 10, says PS5 games “can’t be played directly” from a USB drive. You can move a finished game there to free up space, but you copy it back to the console before you play.

Those are Sony’s rules for PS5 games in general, not a GTA VI statement. GTA VI is a PS5 game, so we expect them to apply, but neither Sony’s GTA VI page nor Rockstar’s pre-load announcement says whether the game can be played or pre-loaded from an external drive. That part is our reading.

Does an M.2 SSD count as internal storage on PS5?

Yes, in the sense that matters. Sony’s M.2 page says that once an SSD is fitted in the expansion slot, you can download PS5 games to it and launch them from there. The drive must meet Sony’s specs, among them a PCIe Gen4x4 NVMe SSD of 250GB to 8TB with a heatsink or similar cooling.

Sony’s FAQ also says all of a game’s data has to sit in one place, so you can’t split it between the console and the M.2 drive. Plan on one of them having the 212GB free that PlayStation asks for.

What about Xbox Series X|S?

Microsoft’s support pages, read on November 10, separate the two kinds of drive. The Storage Expansion Card, which fits a slot on the back of the console, “performs identically” to the internal SSD and can play Optimized for Xbox Series X|S games, Microsoft says. GTA VI’s Xbox Store listing carried that label when we checked the same day.

USB is different. The expansion card page’s FAQ says games can be stored on any compatible drive (USB 3.1, at least 128GB), but optimized Series X|S games have to sit on the internal SSD or an expansion card to be played. So we read it as: USB for storing, the card or internal drive for playing. Again, nothing here is specific to GTA VI.

Can you pre-load to an external drive?

We found no official statement either way for GTA VI. Under the general rules, Sony’s USB page describes direct-to-USB installs only for PS4 games, while its M.2 page says PS5 games can be downloaded straight to an M.2 SSD. On Xbox, Microsoft’s install guide says a Series X|S game on a USB drive has to be transferred before you can play it.

Sony’s GTA VI page tells players to check free space and, if needed, delete data or move it to another storage device. Our reading: pre-load to internal, M.2 or expansion-card storage. Our pre-load guide has the times, the file size page covers the 212GB figure, and Series S owners can see GTA 6 on Xbox Series S.

What we don’t know yet

We don’t know the exact installed size on each console, since Rockstar gives a ceiling, or whether a day-one update adds to it. We couldn’t open Rockstar Support’s GTA VI articles on November 10, so there may be guidance there we haven’t seen, and Rockstar may yet say something GTA VI-specific about external drives.