How to choose the best external hard drive for your PS4 What should you look for in a PS4 hard drive? Once you're happy you're not about to wipe out your gaming history, make sure there's no disc in the drive and turn the PS4 off completely (not standby). If your PS4 heads to standby as standard, hold down on the PS button until the power menu pops up, then select turn off PS4. Next, unplug all the PS4's cables (that's the HDMI lead and power cable most likely). Read and write speeds were great in testing. The 2000MB/s speed you see on the box is as good as you'll get in an external hard drive, but in reality, it translates to some great load times and transfer speeds on PS5 and PC. I had a load of game capture footage stored on my PS5 I had been meaning to move across to my computer for video editing, and even though it was about 30 clips spanning a total of 22GB, the P40 swallowed it up from the PS5 in about a minute. The same was true of games once I formatted the drive for some extra storage. I transferred three games that added up to 18GB, and it moved across in just shy of a minute. The best external hard drives for PS4 1.Toshiba Canvio Flex: Best all-round external hard drive for PS4

How to watch today's Apple October 'Scary Fast' event live - will we see new M3 MacBooks and iPads? For enthusiast gamers, you'll no longer have to delete games to make space for the new additions to your library. Just think about it: the biggest games can top 100GB these days, and the PS4’s original 500GB and 1TB drives just can’t store that many games. When it comes to wanting to upgrade your PS4 hard drive, the first thing to do is to buy your replacement hard drive or SSD. The PS4 uses a 2.5-inch SATA format for hard disks and SSDs, and it’s quite an archaic design now – it’s generally only used for more affordable drives. The Expansion has a subtle exterior that’s admittedly made from plastic, and there’s a little give in the material – but it’s strong enough to be plonked next to your PS4. On the inside, it uses hard disks with speeds that closely match those in PS4 consoles – so you won’t get much improvement, but it won’t slow you down. Any drive you install into your PS4 needs to be under 9.5mm tall thanks to the size of the caddy that lives inside the PS4, which protects the drive and keeps it in place. This is no problem for SSDs, but it does prove to be a little limiting as many 4TB hard drives are a shade too chunky.

Great experiences that stay with you on PS4™ and PS5™

Samsung is the king of consumer SSDs, so it’s no surprise that the firm’s solid-state products are the best options for slotting inside your PS4. The 870 QVO offers great performance levels that are several times faster than the PS4’s hard disks, and you’ll see noticeable upgrades to loading times and performance in the PS4 and PS4 Slim, plus speed improvements in the PS4 Pro, which has a better storage interface. Set the PS4 on a steady surface, put a hand on the shiny top plate and move it to the side a little. This is actually a simple plastic drive cover that's not held in place with screws but a basic clip. Beyond that, this is a well-built drive with a tough anodized aluminium casing, and it even comes with both a USB Type-C cable and Type-A adapter bundled in. You don’t need to spend more on an SSD for your PS4, and the pricing is nearly in HDD territory. Upgrading your PS4 hard disk does take a little bit of research, and it can be daunting to open your console – even if the process is pleasingly simple. However, whichever decision you make, you'll be happy with the expanded space.

Thankfully, there are loads of external storage options to choose from, and they fall into three categories: external desktop drives, external portable drives, and external SSDs. Seagate’s disk is the only product on this list to be officially licensed for the PS4, and that doesn’t just mean you get Sony’s logo – it also means it’s optimized to work smoothly with the console. We run two sets of tests when we’re looking at external hard drives for the PS4 or PS4 Pro. First, we connect them to a PC and run the CrystalDiskMark benchmark to test their raw sequential and random read/write speeds. Sequential speeds are an indication of how fast the drive can read or write large quantities of data in one sustained burst, which makes a big difference when you’re first running a game, loading a saved game, streaming in all the models and textures in a level or transferring a game from one drive to another. Random read/write speeds cover smaller data transfers, and make an impact when you’re running a game directly from the hard drive. Right now, there are only two reasons to choose a desktop external hard drive. First, they can run to larger capacities: even the biggest portable drives max out at 5TB, while desktop drives go up to the full 8TB maximum capacity. You’d have to have a massive games library, though, to make that a deciding factor. Otherwise, some desktop drives have a 7,200RPM spindle speed, where portable drives usually only manage 5,400RPM. This can mean slightly better performance, and slightly shorter loading times.Going beyond the extra space a hard drive provides, if you slot a super-fast SSD into your console, you'll also see a significant speed improvement. Although you'll want to read up on the pros and cons of using an SSD before you do that. On the regular PS4 you'll notice the hard drive is not yet in full view. There's one screw we need to unscrew to release the frame that holds the hard drive, using a Phillips screwdriver. The only problem is, this is meant for professionals, not necessarily gamers. Its short cable is almost as annoying as its high price tag. Regardless, this is definitely one of the best external hard drives on the market if you want a portable solution for gaming, work, or content creation. Best PS4 SSD: FAQs Is PS4 better with SSD? The best PS4 SSD is either an external one, or a SATA SSD that can replace your internal HDD. Either will bring you massive quality of life updates to a console that's approaching 10 years on the market. In terms of internal options, we'd recommend the Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD, or, if you're watching your pennies, the Seagate 1TB Gaming SSHD ST1000LM014. Do PS4 games run better on SSD?

This is such a good SATA-type SSD, that I'm even considering it for my PS3 to breathe new life and durability into that console! Just insert the drive, then in the PS4 menu go to settings > application saved data management > saved data in system storage. Here you'll see an option to copy your saves to a USB drive. You need to select the files game-by-game so you might want to leave out any titles you're never going to play again.

Crucial is another well-known and trusted storage maker, and their most recent additions - the X6 and X8 primarily - Emake for solid PS4 SSD options - as well as cross-gen ones for when you're ready to move to PS5. (Please note: this is a USB-C drive but comes with an adapter.) The other reason to pay extra is that its performance is very good. The Toshiba Canvio Flex is a little faster, particularly when it comes to sequential read/write speeds, but the FireCuda isn’t far behind – and it outpaces most other rivals when it comes to loading games and saved games, albeit only by a couple of seconds in some titles. Its transfer times are also competitive when you’re copying games to and from the internal HDD. If you like the styling, this drive won’t let you down when it comes to performance. If you want to upgrade your PS4 hard drive and are looking for the best hard drive option right now, then you should seek out an SSHD. These drives combine platter-based storage with smaller, faster portions of flash memory, and they learn which files you use frequently and move them to the faster flash storage – so they can be loaded faster. When it comes to running games on PS4, it’s actually the fastest HDD we’ve tested. In A-B tests with the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hard Drive, it shaved 12 seconds off the time it took to load The Last of Us Part II, and 13 seconds off loading a saved game. Differences in other titles aren’t so noticeable – we’re talking just a second or two with Resident Evil 2 – but this is a great HDD if you want your PS4 library close to hand, or want to make the most of PS+ Extra. Crucial’s drives don’t quite have the performance levels of Samsung’s drives, but in the PS4 that is less important thanks to their older storage connectivity systems. Drives like the Crucial BX500 still deliver a good performance boost over the PS4’s internal drives, and they’re just as reliable as Samsung’s products.