How to Set up an External Hard Drive on PS4
Sony released a firmware update for the PlayStation 4 today . Along with some tweaks for PSVR and PS4 Pro users, there is a long-awaited introduction of support for external hard drives. Here’s how to set it up.
To use an external hard drive, it must be a 250GB to 8TB USB 3.0 hard drive. If you’ve recently purchased a hard drive, this should be fine, but if you’re hoping to use something old, you’ll need to double-check before going any further as the PS4 won’t work. Any of these hard drive options handpicked by our deal team will work. Once you have this hard drive, there are a few things you need to do to get it working on your PS4.
Format your hard drive
The first thing you need to do is format your hard drive. So, connect your hard drive to your PS4 using a USB cable. If you’re having trouble recognizing your PS4 hard drive like mine, make sure you’re using a USB 3.0 cable and not the outdated cable that probably comes with the DualShock. Once connected, you just need to go to settings:
- Go to Settings> Devices> USB Drives and select your external hard drive.
- Select ” Format as Extended Storage” and press “X”.
- Select Next and tap X.
- Select ” Format” and press “X”.
- Select Yes and tap X.
- Select OK and tap X.
From now on, any new game or software you install will be on your external hard drive. The saved data and captured images / videos will remain on the internal hard disk.
Transfer data to an external hard drive
If your internal hard drive is really full, you can move some games to an external drive to make room for giant save files or awesome Overwatch captures. It’s pretty simple to do this:
- Go to Settings> Storage> System Storage.
- Select Apps and tap X.
- Tap Options and select Move to Extended Storage .
- Select the games you want to move by clicking the X next to each heading, then choose Move . Wait for the games to move.
That’s it, your external drive is now ready to go and you never have to think about it again.