Sony and Microsoft's battle of consoles continues as a leaked image showed that PS5 will have only 664GB of usable storage which will likely be minuscule in the next-gen.
When new tech is coming out, it is usually preceded by the developers and marketing teams overpromising on the features. The latest case was Nvidia with RTX 3080 supposedly offering twice the performance of RTX 2080 but such things are happening in the console world as well.
One of PlayStation 5's selling points, the flaunted custom SSD that is supposed to knock us all off our feet, has rather small storage, given the fact that it's a next-gen console. A leaked screenshot popped up on ResetEra that showed PS5 users will have only 664GB of usable storage.
Technically, Sony didn't lie about anything here when Mike Cerny's presentation revealed the 825GB size but there are several caveats that future users may not have been aware of at the time.
The size was expressed in Gigabytes (GB) which is always higher than the amount of space that is actually displayed later on, commonly expressed as Gibibytes (GiB). In other words, your system would eventually let you see GiB, which amounted to 768 in PS5's case. To make it more confusing, this unit is often shown as regular GB, just like in the image linked above.
Another caveat is that PlayStation 5's operating system would take up 104 GiB, which resulted in the final available space being 664 GiB.
Compared to Xbox Series X, this is a total of 138 GiB less since Microsoft's console boasts 802 GiB of usable space after the OS and system files are installed, as per IGN's report .
In simple game size terms, this would amount to XSX being able to hold one or two AAA titles without having to delete anything. This could amount to almost twice the size of Cyberpunk 2077 or not a single Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
Keep in mind that both consoles will be able to expand their storage through both external HDD or an additional NVMe SSD. That said, this will incur additional costs.
