If you were thinking of using your PS4’s external storage on your new PS5, I highly recommend holding off until Sony fixes a serious defect in their OS.

When you first connect an external storage with existing PS4 games, the PS5 will attempt to reinstall and update every game already on it. If you have games installed from disc, the PS5 will download some part of the game (possibly day one patches?), then suspend the download/copy, until you insert the disc for every game to copy. You are saved the trouble of inserting every disc for games that were downloaded from the PlayStation Store. However, they will all download automatically, possibly exceeding your monthly data cap.

The only option to ”cancel” all of these suspended downloads requires you to also delete the game.

It also looks like this isn’t a one time occurrence. Removing and reattaching the external storage, restarting the PS5, or coming back from suspend mode, all have a chance of causing this problem to reoccur.

The AskPlaystation Twitter account suggested booting into safe mode and rebuilding the database. This may result in the PS5 deleting all of the games on the external storage.

This seems bad, but isn't really a problem with using external storage devices that already have games installed on them rather than external storage devices in general? It seems that if you attach a blank hard drive or SSD or whatever it would function as expected.

I attached my external drive which had 6 PS4 games on it to my PS5 and it hasn't done that at all. The PS4 games were all fine and worked immediately and the PS5 didn't try and download anything at all relating to any of them (five of them were digital and one disc based). It's only been three days (uk user) but plenty of restarts and resuming from suspend and no issues so far. Will keep an eye out but guessing this is sporadic rather than a guaranteed issue?

I tried both an external HDD with a lot of games coming from my PS4, as well as a new external SDD where I was adding games. Both eventually had this issue. I tried one of the rear ports, as well as the front USB-C, and they both had this occur.

I did have a few disc-based games that wanted the disc inserted to complete the suspended download, that once inserted were removed from the queue without downloading or copying anything from the disc. So it may be completely dependent on the games themselves.

I didn’t notice this was happening until I got a lot of notifications for the digital copies being upgraded.

The PS5 also got confused with some of the games on the external storage. I had to deduce what they were by looking at the external storage’s tabs for what was listed under things you can delete that were missing from things you can move.