How to expand your PS4 storage space with an external hard drive

…using an external SSD

Using a tiny solid-state drive as your PS4’s external expansion solution seems the obvious choice: not only are the drives properly pocketable, they’re also, in theory, much faster than traditional hard drives.

Here, though, the quandry of USB 3.0 comes into play. In theory, USB 3.0 has a top transfer speed of 5Gbps, where SATA III (used by most internal hard drives) offers 6Gbps, which isn’t a huge gulf. The difference, though, is that USB controllers can slow things down a lot – far more noticeably than any differences in drive speed itself.

What’s the outcome? Across all the drives we tested, the speed difference was marginal at best – likely because each had to channel through the USB 3.0 interface in order to talk to the PS4.

Transcend’s ESD220C SSD, for example, has a write speed of 400MB/s – which, while relatively quick, meant there was no major difference using it on the PS4 over the other drives, bar a few seconds shaved off loading times.

Still, as a drive the ESD220C is probably the one you want, if you’ve got the readies: while at 240GB it can’t rival the capacities of the HDDs below, it’s a tiny, tiny device that weighs nothing at all – perfect for packing in your game-sack.

Buy the Transcend ESD220C SSD here from Alza.co.uk

…using an SSHD and a caddy

If, then, an SSD seems to make no noticeable difference beyond a couple of seconds on load screens, what’s the benefit of a hybrid drive?

These disks combine the vast storage capacity of a physical hard drive, with a small solid-state component. The drive learns which files you use most and intelligently puts them onto the quicker sector.

We picked up Seagate’s 1TB Game Drive for PlayStation and stuck it in a USB 3.0 enclosure to see whether that combination made a difference. The answer? Not really – beyond adding a far greater capacity for a lot less cash.

As precisely as we could measure them, load times were near identical to the SSD and, given that the solid-state drive should have been the quickest, we can’t imagine the SSHD getting any faster even as it learns which games are our favourites.

That was very much the same with gameplay, where there was no noticeable lag or bugginess on any of the drives, regardless of their mechanics. The only major benefit we can think of, then, for using a hybrid drive is that it combines a big capacity with the hardiness of flash memory, which might stand the test of time (being reconnected and rebooting repeatedly) a litte better.

…using an external HDD

Speed aside, there’s no trumping the trusty external hard disk drive, with its spinning disks and mechanical components, when it comes to capacity.

Sure, it’s a drive that you might not want to stick in your backpack and toss around, given those internals – but, beyond that, it’s almost identical in transfer and load times (if a pinch slower, and by this we mean it was barely noticeable) to the SSD.

It’s also an inexpensive way to vastly expand your PS4’s storage. The 2TB Seagate Expansion Portable we tested, for example, will set you back just £75.

A word, though, about capacity: while the 4.5 software update supports drives up to 8TB in capacity, anything above this simply won’t work. We had trouble using an 8TB drive which, for some reason, was seen by the PlayStation as having a capacity of 8.01TB – and it refused to format it.

Partitioning the drive into smaller sectors using a PC didn’t help, either, as the PS4 doesn’t seem to recognise these, and will continue to demand that you let it re-format the drive in exFat format – before refusing to do so.

Perhaps this is a PS4 bug that will be squashed in a future update, but for now you should approach 8TB drives with caution.

Buy the Seagate 2TB USB 3.0 portable hard drive here from Maplin