PS5 SSD's Other section is kind of like a recycle bin

PS5 internal storage is premium real estate. If you've ever had to manage your PS5's storage space--since it's only 667GB, I'm sure you have--you'll probably have noticed the Other section. This is a maddening part of the SSD that can't be directly deleted or accessed. So far as I can tell no one knows exactly how this works.

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Sony offers a cryptic explanation:

"This storage space is reserved for system data needed for games and apps to work properly. The amount of space reserved depends on how your console is being used."

Thanks a lot, Sony. That clears things up. Our findings shed some light on the mysterious Other section.

Here's a bit of context.

Right now I'm testing out multiple PCIe 4.0 Gen4 x4 SSDs with the PS5, and I've been doing a fair bit of data migration, management, and recording. It's not always fun. I've had to deal with the PS5's Other section many times now and it's always a headache.

While trying to make room for Far Cry 6 on the PS5's SSD, I noticed something interesting: The Other section is sometimes a recycle bin that stores deleted content.

Here's what happened:

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My PS5 needed approximately 3.78GB of free space for me to move Far Cry 6 over to the SSD. So I moved 4.71GB of screenshots over to an external USB and then deleted them from the internal SSD.

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The console still told me I needed 3.78GB of free space available. Weird. Why didn't the available space shrink? I had just deleted over 4GB of data.

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It turns out the PlayStation 5 moved the deleted screenshots over to the Other section, which is inaccessible. The Other section had grown by roughly 4.7GB, the size of the deleted files.

Even weirder.

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The only thing I thought to do was to restart the system and see what happened. Lo and behold, the system actually recognized the free space and the Other section had shrunk.

So if you ever delete or move content from the PlayStation 5, make sure you also restart the system or do a hard reboot just to make sure things get ironed out.