The PS4 hard drive is a wonderful thing, until you run out of space. Changing it is easy, but easy doesn’t mean it lacks frustrations.
I recently hit that particular landmark when I just couldn’t quite delete enough content and keep everyone in the house that plays on the PS4 — which is, essentially speaking, everybody — happy. So off to the online emporium of technical things that we call the Internet to buy me a larger hard drive. The standard PS4 hard drive in the PS4 is 500GB, which sounds massive, but isn’t when you consider that even disc-based games chew up the gigabytes with self-installs and gargantuan patches.
PS4 Hard Drive: Go big
As such, my first tip would be this: Don’t bother with a 1TB drive as your replacement PS4 hard drive.
Sure, they’re cheap, but you’re only doubling your capacity and putting off the inevitable. Ideally you don’t want to be doing this more than once, so go for the largest drive you can fit in there and reasonably afford; at the time of writing I’d say that’s a 2TB drive, partially because you can get them in the under-9.5mm size that the PS4 demands, and partly because anything larger in a 2TB drive is still very expensive. I didn’t extensively shop around, but still scored a decent brand 2TB drive for under $200.
There are a million and one guides online, and I’m not going to repeat the… ah, the hell with it, why not.
PS4 Hard Drive: Condensed how to
Buy a 2TB Drive that’s 9.5mm or thinner from somewhere. Back up your game saves (Setttings>Application Saved Data Management) to an external USB device…
And this is where my second tip comes in. Most guides will tell you that you only need 10 minutes or so to change the drive over. They lie. Or they’re written for folks who only ever purchased one or two PS4 games, because if you have any quantity of games — let’s say for argument you’ve been on PlayStation Plus long enough to have a library of “Free” games (not free; you pay for PSN access after all) all with their own save files, then you’ll need more time to back up those saves.
Tip One: Use the backup and restore facility in settings. A lot of guides (including the ones I read) advise that you have to do one-to-one copies, but you don’t, and you’ll waste a LOT of time otherwise. The one exception seems to be if you’re transferring to a PS4 that will be running a different firmware update to the one you’re transferring from, because the PS4 doesn’t seem to like that.
But if I missed it, others could too. So use that if you can, but if you can’t (which could be the case if you’re transferring to a system with different firmware for example) then read on…
(With thanks to Craig for the clarification! See, I own my mistakes when they happen)
This is because Sony’s system for copying those saves is convoluted and stupid. Really, it is. You have to access each title individually, and while you can select all the save files for that title, you can only copy one title’s saves at a time, even to a fast drive. As such, if you do have a decent sized library, you’re going to be there for a while.
Of course, if you have tasty upload speeds, you could back up to the cloud if you’re on PlayStation Plus. Maybe you already did, and bully for you. Still, I’d advise the latter, because a drive in your hand is a download you don’t have to do again… or at least one of them. If you change drives and discover your cloud backups are iffy, you’re a bit more stuck that way. Now, back to actually changing drives.
Download the latest system firmware from here, noting that you want the full 700-800MB for a replacement system version, not the 300-400MB partial one for an existing system. Pop off the side of the PS4 (very easy), unscrew the large screw with the PlayStation symbols on it (also easy) and pop out the caddy. Four black screws (two each side) and the 500GB drive pops out. Pop in new drive, screws back in, PlayStation screw back in, pop case back on.
Oh yeah. Unplug it first and make sure there’s no disc in there, OK?
This is what happens when I rush. You should not rush. You don’t need to rush, and it’s not hard. Like I said, though, millions of guides with pictures or videos out there if you need it. It’s not tricky.
PS4 Hard Drive: Gather your tools… erm… games
When you reboot, the system firmware runs across the drive, and here’s my next tip: While that happens, gather up any and all disc-based PS4 games you might have. Discs? Remember those? Well, if you want to access your old saves for disc-based games, you’re going to need them, eventually, so you may as well have them handy, and you’ll have a few minutes while the system initialises.
PS4 Hard Drive: The Internet is for games
The next step is to ensure you’ve got a healthy Internet connection. What do I mean by that? Well, I’m thinking here in the Australian context, and that means two things: Speed (if you can get it… thanks, NBN-that-will-be-25Mbps-for-all-Australians-by-2016-that-never-stood-a-chance-of-happening!*) but above all download quota.
Got any PSN games, either full titles you’ve purchased or games you got as part of your subscription? You’re going to have to download them all, or at least the ones you want to play again, and that’s going to take some serious time, especially for larger titles. I’m writing this in hour seven of a PS4 restore off a reasonably nippy Telstra cable connection, and the end appears to be quite far off.
PS4 Hard Drive: Copying confusion
Here’s where it gets annoying, though, and why I suggested you have those discs to hand. Remember when you copied those precious game saves over to a USB device of some flavour? It’d be pretty handy to copy them back while your files download, right?
Well, tough luck. You can’t. Not only do you have to use the whole single-interface-copy-one-at-a-time thing to drag saves back from USB to PS4 (a pain point in itself), but the PS4 won’t even let you do that unless the game’s been previously installed. At all. No, I have no idea why this is. It just is.
For online PlayStation Store games, that means waiting for the whole thing to download, while for disc based games, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, you don’t need the latest patch, but you do need to throw the disc into the PS4 for long enough for it to allow you to start. That would appear to copy over the base “yes, this system has seen this game” files that will then let you slowly, painfully copy your saves off your USB drive.
PS4 Hard Drive: Disc discus
So my last tip: Do all your disc swapping while you wait for your other downloads to happen. You don’t have to start any app; just pop the disc in, let it do its small install (which will also trigger any patches to add to the download queue, because you’re clearly not burning enough data as it is) and then move on to the next one. At the very least, this should allow you to copy the saves off your USB device to your PS4 and its shiny new hard drive.
PS4 Hard Drive: Get your act together, Sony!
I do love the fact that Sony makes no secret of the idea that it wants PlayStation owners to upgrade their hard drives, and makes it easy to do so from a physical standpoint. USB would be easier (and to be fair and balanced, that’s what the Xbox One does, formatting as it goes, but that’s still a thing) but it’s still not a hard drive swap even if you’ve never tried such a thing before.
I do wish, however, that they made the practical aspects of it easier. Would it kill you, Sony, to do a “select all saves” dialog for copying from or for that matter to a new PS4 hard drive, even if the game hasn’t been installed, even if the user hasn’t used full backup and restore? What are people going to be doing with those game saves and no game anyway?
*As Ben Elton might say, little bit of politics there. Hey, there’s an election on right now. I’m allowed to.