Sony released a PlayStation 4 firmware update today. Alongside some tweaks for PSVR and PS4 Pro users comes the long awaited introduction of external hard drive support. Here’s how to set it up.
In order to use an external hard drive it needs to be a USB 3.0 hard drive with a storage capacity between 250GB and 8TB. If you’ve purchased a hard drive any time recently this should be fine, but if you’re hoping to make use of something old, you’ll want to double-check before you go further, as the PS4 won’t work. Any of these hard drive options rounded up by our Deals team will work. Once you have that hard drive, you need to do a few things 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 have problems with the PS4 recognizing the hard drive like I was, make sure you’re using a USB 3.0 cable and not the now-ancient cable that likely came with your DualShock. Once it’s connected, you just need to hop into your settings:
Head to Settings > Devices > USB Storage Devices and select your external hard drive.
Select Format as Extended Storage and tap X.
Select Next and tap X.
Select Format and tap X.
Select Yes and tap X.
Select Okay and tap X.
From here on out, any new game or software you install will be located on your external hard drive. Save data and image/video captures will stay on the internal hard drive.
Move Your Data to the External Hard Drive
If your internal hard drive is really full, you might want to move some games over to the external drive to make space for gigantic save files or amazing Overwatch captures. This is pretty easy to do:
Head to Settings > Storage > System Storage.
Select Applications and tap X.
Tap Options, select Move to Extended Storage.
Select the games you want to move by pressing X next to each title, then select Move. Wait for the games to transfer.
That’s it, now your external drive is all ready to go and you’ll never have to think about it again.