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SvennoJ on 12 November 2021
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scrapking said:

Heh, yes, I meant TB, not GB!  Good catch!  :)

Fair enough if you don't prefer an external drive plugged in.  But copying from an external drive back to the SDD would be vastly faster on average than re-installing from disc, and the older the game gets the bigger the advantage of copying from an external drive becomes.  On the external drive it can (optionally) keep the game up to date as patches come out.  Whereas re-installing from disc will trigger a growing cascade of patches and other updates as the game gets older.  Hell, there are AAA games that have a single GB on the disc, almost all of the game has to be installed from the cloud even if you have the disc.  And that's BEFORE content updates and any patches enter the picture.

Whereas moving an average AAA tile from a USB SSD might take 8-ish minutes, and from a USB HDD might take 20-ish minutes.  Even if you have Gigabit internet or better, installing from disc would likely take far longer due to the downloads required.

It does occur to me that the external drive doesn't need to be plugged in all the time, either.  You can copy to it, and unplug it when you're done.  You can later copy back from it, and again unplug it when you're done.  Most systems have both front and rear USB ports these days.  If you only plug the USB drive in when you're copying a game back or forth, it's not a lot different than hunting down the disc and putting it in the drive.  Other than you'd probably wait longer if installing it from disc, on average.

To each their own, everyone has different preferences, and I prefer the advantages of selecting from the (virtual) fronts of boxes for digital games over the spines of physical game boxes.  And I'm on a Series S so I can't speak to how the PS5 organizes digital games.  But I can say that copying back from an external drive is going to be objectively faster, on average.

The cascade of patches is luckily a thing of the past. Everything I've re-installed from ps4 only had one patch to bring it up to date, GT Sport included. (A big patch sure, but actually faster since the longest process is making a copy of the game first. Re-install and it only has to make a copy of the base game at release) PS3 was never fixed though, re-installing GT6 takes a full day of patch after patch.

Re-installing from disc also lets you start the game with only a small part copied, but that's only useful if you don't want to wait for the patches to make it up to date. PS4 let you play while still installing the rest from disc in the background, PS5 the same. (Yet patches can't be applied until everything has been copied)

A Series-S with disc would be very tempting. Series-X slim revision would do as well. The thing just doesn't fit in my AV cabinet. The PS5 slides in on its side. If I move the PS3 to a thinner gap, WiiU to a different room, then there would be a similar sized space for a Series-X slim next to the ps5. Yet as it is now, the Series-X would be too tight of a fit and as it's just a big rectangle it would block all airflow.