No, Your PS5 Isn't Haunted
The PlayStation 5 has been out for a little over a week now, and the gamers that were lucky enough to snag one for themselves have been eager to dive into the system's impressive list of launch titles. However, Sony's newest console has a couple of strange behaviors that have caused concern among fans. One of them might even lead you to believe that a particularly annoying poltergeist has taken over your beloved PS5.
PS5 owners online are complaining of a weird habit the console has: at least once every hour, some people have found that their PS5 disc drive will loudly spin for ten or twenty full seconds. It's unclear exactly why the console does this, but fans aren't particularly pleased. "It's really loud and annoying and seems to serve absolutely no purpose," wrote one user. "Is anyone else experiencing this?"
Even stranger, some players have reported that the disc drive does this periodically during any activity on the PS5. One player mentioned that they were playing a digital copy of Demon's Souls, but the other game disc in the drive was still spinning every now and then. This person also explained that the disc drive was so loud that they thought the sound was coming from the PS5's cooling fans. Perhaps even more annoying was the experience shared by another player: they were simply watching Netflix and the disc drive kept spinning, interrupting the movie at odd intervals with a loud whirring sound. As long as there is a disc in the console, the disc drive will take it for a quick spin just about once an hour.
One user on the ResetEra forums suggested that the weird spinning could be a new type of authentication process, one used by the PS5 to verify that there's a licensed game inside the console. However, as this person pointed out, it doesn't make a huge amount of sense for the console to do this while playing something that has been fully downloaded and installed, much less while using a streaming service like Netflix or Hulu.
Thankfully, this doesn't seem to be a universal issue. A few gamers have mentioned that they haven't encountered this problem with the disc drive, at all.
This odd little quirk of the PS5 is just the latest in a series of issues that fans have discovered with the console after launch. While the system received positive reviews from critics before it was released, people who bought the console are quickly finding problems that the reviewers didn't notice. At the very least, this latest issue doesn't seem quite as bad as the ones plaguing the PS5's rest mode, or the bizarre glitch that actually killed one player's PS5 outright.