How to Add an External Hard Drive to PlayStation — Bump Up Your Gaming! | Seagate Blog (2024)

PlayStation 4 now supports external hard drive storage!

Game-heads everywhere are pretty excited at the new features that arrived this week on our PS4 consoles, with Sony’s newest major system software update, version 4.50. From the ability to view 3D Blu-ray movies in stereoscopic 3D directly on your PS VR headset, to the ability to post your best gameplay moments directly to the PlayStation Activity Feed, new custom wallpapers using your own in-game screenshots, and slicker and faster user interface tools.

But the biggest buzz and the best news is PS4’s new support for external hard drives, giving you the freedom to massively increase your storage of games and apps! So clear your schedule and make some free time — you’re gonna have a lot more games at hand to conquer!

Of course we know it’s easy to upgrade the hard drive inside your PS4 to boost capacity and speed, but many of us want still more storage space on the console, and PlayStation has our backs.

With this PS4version 4.50 update, now you can store content to an external hard drive by plugging in a USB 3.0 HDD into your PS4. Bingo, you can quintuple the original space on your console with a Seagate Game Drive for PS4 with 2TB, or use another of our portable models for easy travel to friends’ houses with up to 5TB of space. Or even septendecuple your space with up to an 8TB desktop external drive — wow!

You can download and install applications directly to your external drive, and simply manage all your saved content using the PlayStation settings menu —and all your saved applications will appear in the Content Launcher of the Home Screen so you can quickly access whatever apps you recently launched.

Usingan external hard drive to store games and apps on aPS4

Seagate’s product lab team has been testing the new feature during the beta phase and it’s been working great! Set up is simple —just plug your external USB 3.0 drive into one of PS4 USB ports, navigate to Settings, Devices, USB Storage Devices, then select your new drive and choose “Format as Extended Storage.”

Then to tell your PS4 to save all your future data on your new, bigger drive, just highlight the new drive in the settings (under USB Storage Devices), press “Options” on your controller, and choose “Confirm” —all data will henceforth be saved to your new drive.

You can even move any of your existing content from your PS4’s internal drive to your new external drive. Just choose “Manage Content” from the confirmation screen, highlight any game you want to move and click the “Options” button, then select “Move to Extended Storage.”

Step-by-step: how to add external storage to your PS4

Okay, who’s ready to boost your gaming options by massive quantities? Let’s make it dead simple with some easy illustrated instructions.

This is how to add an external drive to your PS, step-by-step:

1) Plug the USB 3.0 drive into your PS4’s USB port, then go to “Settings”

2) Then “Devices”

3) Then “USB Storage Devices”

4) Press the X button to select the new drive

5) Select “Format as Extended Storage” (Note: Formatting will erase everything on the drive!)

6) Select “Next”

7) Select “Format”

8) Once the formatting is complete the drive will now show up under Settings>Storage as Extended Storage

Yourexternal drive is now setup for PlayStation 4 external storage, and will be used as the default location for game and app installations. If you ever want to change the default to a different drive, you can easily to that in the PlayStation’s storage settings.

(Of course, if you ever decide to use this external drive with a Mac or Windows system, you’d need to reformat the drive again to the appropriate format — the PlayStation 4 file system is not recognized by Windows or Mac.)

OK it’s time to play all your new games and save and share your most awesome gameplay moments – let me know when you come up for air!