Best SSD for GTA 6 on PS5 (and Xbox Expansion Cards), November 2026

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TL;DR

GTA 6 needs up to 212 GB on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Before you buy anything, try the free fix: move other games to a USB drive or delete some. If you still need more space, here's what's worth buying in November 2026:

• Cheapest drive that meets Sony's spec: Biwin Black Opal NV7400 1TB, about $175, plus a heatsink.
• Safe all-rounder: WD_BLACK SN850X 1TB, about $260 without a heatsink.
• Best value for 2TB: Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB, about $400. It's a PCIe 5.0 drive that runs at PCIe 4.0 speed in a PS5, and it was still cheaper than the 2TB SN850X with a heatsink.
• Most space for the money: Team Group MP44 4TB, about $326.
• Xbox Series X|S: a storage expansion card, from about $240 for 1TB.

SSDs cost far more than they did a year ago because of the memory shortage, so check the price on the day before you buy. Black Friday starts November 27, eight days after GTA 6 launches.

A quick disclosure: I work at TinyFish. We don't sell SSDs, and nothing here is an affiliate link. The requirements come from Sony's PS5 SSD guide. The prices come from listings collected by Tom's Hardware and PC Gamer, checked on November 10, 2026.

First, try the free fix

Pre-loading started on November 10, so you may already know whether GTA 6 fits. If it doesn't:

1. Check what's using space. On PS5, go to Settings > Storage > Console Storage.
2. Move games you aren't playing to a USB drive. PS5 games can sit on USB extended storage, but you can't play them from there. You'd copy them back later, which is still much faster than downloading them again.
3. Delete what you can download again. Anything you own digitally can come back later.

If that frees 212 GB, you're done. If not, read on.

What Sony requires for a PS5 SSD

From Sony's guide:

Three things that catch people out:

• PCIe 5.0 drives work, but only at PCIe 4.0 speed. That's fine. Sometimes a Gen 5 drive is simply the better deal.
• You need a heatsink. A drive sold "with heatsink" usually costs much more. Tom's Hardware found the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro with a heatsink at $944. A drive without one plus a third-party PS5 heatsink is usually cheaper. Check that the heatsink fits Sony's size limits.
• DRAM-less drives can be slower on PS5. The PS5 doesn't support Host Memory Buffer, which many cheaper drives rely on. Sony warns these "may experience slower-than-expected performance". For one game, you probably won't notice.

The best SSDs for GTA 6 on PS5

All of these meet Sony's 5,500 MB/s recommendation. Prices are US listings checked on November 10, 2026.

Drives to skip for PS5: anything under 5,500 MB/s, like the Patriot P410 (4,500 MB/s) or Silicon Power UD90 (5,000 MB/s). They're fine in a PC, but below Sony's recommendation. GTA 6 will still run from internal storage, so if you need space for older games, they'll do. Just don't install GTA 6 on them.

How I'd choose

• You only need room for GTA 6: a 1TB drive. The Biwin NV7400 at about $175 is the cheapest fast option. Add a heatsink.
• You'll keep buying big games: 2TB. The Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB at $399.99 was cheaper than most 2TB PCIe 4.0 drives with a heatsink.
• You want to stop thinking about space: the Team Group MP44 4TB at about $326 cost less than several 2TB drives on the same day.
• You don't want to fit a heatsink yourself: buy a "with heatsink" model and accept paying about $100 more.

Xbox Series X|S: expansion cards

Xbox works differently. Series X|S games run from the internal drive or an official storage expansion card. A USB drive can store them but can't play them.

Sources: Geeky Inc and Windows Central.

Expansion cards cost more per terabyte than PS5 M.2 drives. They need no tools and no heatsink: you plug one into the back of the console.

Wait for Black Friday, or buy now?

Black Friday starts November 27, a week after GTA 6 launches. It's tempting to wait, but this year it's a real gamble:

• Prices are high everywhere. PC Gamer's Black Friday guide says it's "a weird time for SSDs thanks to the memory supply crisis" and doesn't expect last year's prices to come back. SK hynix expects memory demand to exceed supply through 2030.
• Some drives are already discounted. The Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB was down 41%, from $679.97 to $399.99, on November 10.
• Pre-loading is the real deadline. If you want to play at midnight on November 19, the game has to be on your console first.

My take: if you need the space for launch, buy a drive that's on sale now. If you can wait a week, set a price alert and see what Black Friday brings.

Set a price alert for the drive you want

SSD prices change weekly right now, and nobody wants to check five store pages a day. TinyMonitor, part of TinyFish, can watch a product page and email you when the price changes.

1. Go to agent.tinyfish.ai/monitor and select New monitor.
2. Choose Page and paste the product page of the drive you want.
3. Schedule it daily, or every few hours during Black Friday week.
4. Under Purpose, write the change you care about, for example: The 2TB price drops below $380
5. Turn on email updates.

Some store pages load the price with JavaScript or block automated checks. If an alert comes back without a price, use a Topic monitor instead, with a search like Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB deal. It flags new deal posts as they appear.

Each check costs $0.005 plus one TinyFetch or TinySearch call, which counts toward your free daily allowance. A daily alert is about $0.15 a month. My GTA 6 price drop alert guide walks through the same setup in more detail, including sending alerts to Discord or Slack.

A note on how I put this together

I first asked TinySet, TinyFish's table builder, for a table of PS5-compatible drives with specs and current US prices. It got the specs right: read speeds, PCIe generation and which drives include a heatsink. The price column came back mostly empty, and one price looked far too high. Many retailer pages load prices with JavaScript or block automated visitors, so I took prices from Tom's Hardware's and PC Gamer's listings instead and checked them against each other. If you build a price table like this yourself, check the price column before you trust it.

More on GTA 6

• GTA 6 release time in every time zone
• GTA 6 price by edition, region and retailer
• GTA 6 PC release date: what's confirmed

Watch any product page for a price drop. Start free on TinyFish.