Well, USB flash drive can store other things such as save games, recorded footage, media files, etc. Not to mention that the PS5 allows for fine-tuning what to install & how much (e.g. just the multi-player portion of a game). Dunno if Xbox 4 allows for that.
Look up Xbox Smart Delivery - it seems a lot of your arguments for the PS5 come from having paid more attention to it. AFAIK the XO(S/X) allows for other/smaller storage devices for non-game storage (recordings etc.), no idea about the PS4 here or how/if this will change for the upcoming generation.
Isn't that such a tall & (currently) unrealistic requirement to meet given the PS5's 5.5 GB/s SSD speed?
While I don't have any citation, this is only something I read from Eurogamer, though to be fair they might've not mentioned "off-the-shielf".
From Mark Cerny's presentation of the PS5's storage system, you'll need an SSD that at minimum matches the speed of the internal one, so yes, that is the basis of the requirement. That doesn't change the fact that you currently have to pay (potentially a lot) more than the XSX's storage card for such an SSD.
I'm just stating this as something for the average joe out there. Sure mechanical HDD are much slower but they have more capacity for cheaper. Not everybody is amped for speed. Having USB flash drives as extra storage is good to have. For example, I have a few idle flash drives doing nothing for the foreseeable future & wanna make good use of em as game/stuff storage.
You don't seem to be spotting how you are twisting this up. Here's the currently known realities:
Both PS4 and XO(S/X) require a minimum of 250GB (IIRC one of them requires 256GB) for any external storage device for game storage. USB 3.0 is also required, as USB 2.0 would lead to
dreadful loading speeds. AFAIK the Xbox allows for other storage devices for non-game storage (recordings etc.), no idea about the PS4 here.
The XSX has a 1TB (802GB usable after formatting and OS) ~2.4GB/s SSD and has a proprietary expansion port with $229 1TB (920GB usable after formatting) ~2.4GB/s SSD cards for now, and a vague promise of more options down the line. This is a simple, plug-and-play solution that
anyone can use, requiring zero tools, but it's also more expensive.
The PS5 has a 825GB (~611GB rumored usable after formatting and OS) ~5.5GB/s SSD, and allows for m.2 expansion with certified drives matching or exceeding the performance of the internal SSD. So far there are two options fulfilling this requirement (though none are certified as of now), and both are more expensive than the XSX expansion card. This also requires the user to remove the side panel of the PS5 (requiring a risky-looking bending of a corner, which IMO
definitely will lead to breakage) and screwing in a small, fragile bare-PCB SSD into a fragile m.2 slot. This is definitely not for the non-tech-savvy. It's potentially cheaper and has more choice, but is it better? Arguably not.
As for external USB storage, we know that neither console supports using that for next-gen titles, as these games will be built around the assumption of being able to stream in assets at the speed of the internal SSD. We're not talking slower loading speeds in other words, we're talking
major, multi-second in-game freezes if these games were run from slower external storage. Playing them off USB-based storage is simply not feasible, even with an USB 3.2G1-connected NVMe SSD (those top out at ~1GB/s). MS has committed to allowing storage (archiving) of games on external storage (you need to transfer them to the internal/expansion drive to play them), with no word from Sony on this yet AFAIK. MS has apparently lowered the minimum requirement for external game storage since the previous generation, to 128GB. Sony might do the same, or they might keep their current 250GB minimum, or they might do away with it entirely - though the latter is unlikely, as using a <=64GB USB stick to store games will work very poorly.
