PS4 Swapping hard drives

TinyInkognegroT

TinyInkognegroT

Member
if I upgrade my original PS4 hard drive to a 2tb, can I put the old one back in and it would still work? I have games from someone else's profile on the original hard drive and I want to keep playing them without him having to add his profile to the new hard drive... Of course if I'm not able to do this I can always have him at his profile to the new hard drive
 
To do that, you will need to transfer the game installation into external drive first. When you want to start afresh with 2TB drive, you can reconnect the external drive to access the game libraries back, saves more time rather than having to redownload it.

On the other hand, you can only move the game installation from HDD to external drive and vice versa. If you want to copy a game from external drive, you have to clone entire HDD for that.

If you clone the HDD that cointain a game that you did not own yet like the game disc, you will need to have its disc version or purchase its license from PS store to allow the game runs on your console.
 
amirzaim said:
To do that, you will need to transfer the game installation into external drive first. When you want to start afresh with 2TB drive, you can reconnect the external drive to access the game libraries back, saves more time rather than having to redownload it.

On the other hand, you can only move the game installation from HDD to external drive and vice versa. If you want to copy a game from external drive, you have to clone entire HDD for that.

If you clone the HDD that cointain a game that you did not own yet like the game disc, you will need to have its disc version or purchase its license from PS store to allow the game runs on your console.
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I don't have an external hard drive these two hard drives are internal hard drives... I'm not able to just throw in the old internal hard drive once I swapped it with the new internal hard drive?
 
TinyInkognegroT said:
if I upgrade my original PS4 hard drive to a 2tb, can I put the old one back in and it would still work? I have games from someone else's profile on the original hard drive and I want to keep playing them without him having to add his profile to the new hard drive... Of course if I'm not able to do this I can always have him at his profile to the new hard drive
Click to expand...
if you dont put the psn acct on the new hdd, the psn downloaded games from that profile will not work.
 
that's an interesting question. this is supposed to work on a NOR PS3, and I believe the ps4 has 14 or 15 hdd partitions regardless of model. if there's an equivalent to the xregistry on the hdd, then this is probably possible. btw, I'm not sure if you're aware, but the question could be construed as piracy related, since you don't own the content. I'll leave it at that. what I said is pure speculation though, without actually having done it. I've never done it on the ps3 either, but many have reported that it works. the xregistry contains the serial number of the hdd. if that's on the hdd, swapping hdds should work, since the system won't know that you've done that.
 
I think that there's no reason to upgrade the internal anymore. Externals can do everything internals can. I bought a 3 TB for only $39.99 on Amazon (used but backed by Amazon for 1 year) a few days ago. It needs an enclosure, but still worth it.

When you upgrade the internal you have to reinstall everything, while an external you just plug it in and you're ready to go. No worrying about losing profiles or anything.

Even if you already have the hard drive all you have to do is purchase an enclosure for $10-$20 and you are set.
 
funny thing is that I play so little of the ps4 that all I have is the internal drive. I have an external plugged into it, but it just has a backup of all 700GBs worth of pkgs or so.
 
Yeah I upgraded my original PS4 internal before and it was a pain you have to redownload everything and backup then reinstall your saves. This was before Sony made it where you could use externals.

I mean if you have the hard drive sitting there don't want to purchase anything else and don't mind redownloading/reinstalling everything go for it, but if you have the choice of choosing internal or external external is way easier.
 
I need to format mine to get rid of a profile. I know the profile is stored on there, but I don't know what file it is or if it's just like the xregistry. I need to format it on the pc to get rid of remnants of old accounts. the ps3 NOR does this as well. bits still remain if formatted on the system. @sandungas described it as being written over, so small snippets of words and numbers remain. I bet the ps4 is similar. even if it doesn't matter, I need that piece of mind.
 
One more thing - if you have couple of hard drives with identical or different capacity, you can set up RAID or SPAN configuration of your PS4 external drives with a special enclosure. No need to spend more for bigger drives if you know how to set up with RAID/SPAN configs.

My external HDD with RAID 0 setup detected on my PS4 and able to use it. However, RAID 0 functions could be limited to 500GB capacity each disk if you're using 2.5" HDD drives or 1TB each disk if using 3.5" HDD drives. SMR technology become a culprit for RAID setups.
 
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