How to Replace / Install PS4 Hard Drive

The PS4 is a cracking’ machine. Brilliant in fact. But really, Sony what were you thinking with only giving us a 500GB hard drive. ‘Oh it was to keep costs down,’ you will no doubt reply, but that is a bit of a false economy, as the costs go back up when we have to replace our HDDs ourselves.

It also to be far has been a bit of a slow start for me when it comes to PS4 gaming as at this moment in time I simply have the games that came free with PS+ as well as The Last of Use Remastered, Wolfenstein, Sniper III, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Infamous Second Son, Watch Dogs and Killzone. So a reasonable mediocre collection at this point, so imagine my surprise when I checked my free space and noted I had had 92GB out of my initial 500GB left!

Well all that meant was it was upgrade time.

The story is not that simply however. As in the past, probably January (isn) 2014 I did try to pre empt this situation and took it upon myself to do an early upgrade to limit the hassle of re-downloading all of my games and game data. however back then I was one of the PS4 users who couldn’t upgrade to 2TB. The reasons for that were that at that time Seagate made the only compatible and affordable 2TB drive for PS4. However it came in an enclosure, you had to take it apart…

That wouldn’t put me off however and I did purchase it back then, that’s when the problems arose. It was quickly established that if you cracked open your PS4 and found a HGST drive staring at you chance were that the Seagate drive was going to be incompatible with your system. Basically there was ‘handshake’ issues between the hardware, but I won’t bore you with that as now it is all thankfully ancient history! (Workarounds were present but I like things to work right 100% of the time, so I shifted the drive on to someone who could use it properly.)

So after a bit of reading I established with a degree of certainty that I could live with that the hand shake issues that were previously present were now gone. No matter what drive you had in your PS4 the Seagate 2TB M9T drive was / is now 100% compatible.

That’s all I needed to here, and off to the shops I trekked picking the drive up for £69.99 and back to the house I hurried to try it out.

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Seagate Expansion HDD 3TB UnBoxing & Time Machine.

A quick unboxing gallery of a Seagate 3TB Expansion Desktop Drive (USB 3.0).

For reference the drive is a mere 36.0mm thick and cost only £80.

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As you can see from the last images I use this drive as a Time Machine. At this price it is a very affordable back up (Time Machine) solution. The speeds are good, and by that I mean I don’t notice them being slow. I can’t comment on how it operates as a daily drive however as a TM it has given me no problems, I haven’t even noticed it was there. Which makes it pretty much ideal!

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