Digital Foundry compared load times from a Seagate 4 TB Expansion drive and the PS4's internal drive and found the external Seagate drive was noticeably faster on every game they tried running on either the base PS4 or the PS4 Pro. Even faster load times can be had with an external SSD (solid state drive) if you're willing to pay a much higher cost per GB of storage and do some after-market work to slot the SSD into a USB enclosure.

  • It was a long time coming but you can finally connect an external hard disc drive (HDD) to your PlayStation 4 (PS4) or PS4 Pro. The days of swapping games in and out of the meager 500 GB (Gigabyte.
  • Can I Download games from Steam to an External Hard Drive and move them to a new computer without using DRM? I download all of my games from Steam. I want to download Mass Effect 2 but it is made by EA so it has DRM. EA will only let you download it 3 times.
Digital Foundry compared load times from a Seagate 4 TB Expansion drive and the PS4's internal drive and found the external Seagate drive was noticeably faster on every game they tried running on either the base PS4 or the PS4 Pro. Even faster load times can be had with an external SSD (solid state drive) if you're willing to pay a much higher cost per GB of storage and do some after-market work to slot the SSD into a USB enclosure.

Move to Extended Storage

Ps3 Game Updates

Credit: Playstation/YouTube

Games are easily moved from the internal to the external drive. Press the Options button while you’re in Storage and an option to move to extended storage will appear. Movement is fairly slow so you might want to run a test with a small game before you launch a move for everything you want to get off your internal drive. Wherever a game is stored, save files, screenshots and video clips are stored on the internal drive.

Download

Can I Download Steam Games To External Hard Drive

Can I Download Game Updates To External Hard Drive?

If you disconnect the external drive while the console is powered on, data loss or corruption may occur. To disconnect the external drive go to [Settings] > [Devices] > [USB Storage Devices] and press Stop Using This Extended Storage.

If the system is not shut down correctly, you may get a message that the external storage drive needs to be repaired. When it happened to me, the process didn’t take long and I didn’t notice any loss of data.

Eight TB is a lot better than 500 GB or 1 TB but sooner or later you’ll fill it. However, with that much storage, it should be easier to decide which games to banish to your Library when you need to make room.

[Updated to include more recent information.]