If you have a PS4, you probably wondered on many occasions how to install games on the PS4 external hard drive and let me tell you that doing it is very easy. In this way you can save internal space and you can have a disk of up to 8 TB to be able to install all the games you want and not have to worry about the storage space on your console.
How to Download and Install Games on PS4 External Hard Drive
The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the latest version of your PS4 firmware. You should also consider that not just any external hard drive works on the console.
For this you will need one with a minimum size of 250 GB and that has USB 3.0, it will have to be connected directly to the console, it is not worth using a hub.
Another thing to keep in mind is that it must be formatted in a “special” way so that the PS4 can read it. In case you want to use the same disk on a computer, you will have to reformat it.
So what we are going to do is connect the disk to the console, turn it on and we are going to follow these simple steps to be able to format it so that the PS4 can read it :
- Let’s go to the ” Settings ” screen .
- Next, we are going to enter ” Devices “.
- After this we will have to choose ” USB storage devices “.
- Here you will have to choose the external hard drive that we connected previously.
- Now you will have to choose ” Format as extended storage “.
Install games on PS4 external hard drive
In this way your console will recognize that the disc is valid and you will be able to access it. You can now save games in this. What we must do now is configure everything so that it recognizes it as default storage and in this way the games that we download do so directly on the external HDD.
As for the saved games and content of the system, it is saved on the internal disk of the console and it is something that we cannot change in any way.
- So to configure the disk we are going to go to ” Settings “.
- Next, we must go to ” Storage “.
- In this place we will be able to see the hard disk of the console and we will select the external one.
- Here you must press the ” Options ” button on the remote and go to the ” Application installation location ” section.
- In this place you will have to select the option ” Extended storage “.
- That is the only thing you need to do to get all the games to download and install on the external hard drive. In case you want them to continue doing it internally, you will have to repeat the steps, only you will not have to select ” Extended storage ” but “System storage “.
How to move games from internal to external hard drive
You can also move all the games from the internal hard drive of the console to the external one. This is quite useful because we can free up a huge amount of space.
- For this we are going to go to ” Settings “.
- Then we will have to enter ” Storage “.
- Now we are going to go to “System Storage ” and here we will have to enter ” Applications “.
- In this section we are going to have to press on ” Options ” on the remote and we are going to choose the option that says ” Move to expanded storage “.
- After this you will have to choose the games you want to move to the external hard drive and press ” Move and accept “.
That would be all. In case you want to stop using the external hard drive, you will first have to disable it from the PS4 . This is quite easy to do, since you only have to press and hold the PS button on the controller to access the quick menu of the system.
Here you have to choose the option ” Stop using extended storage ” and that’s it. In this way you can even change hard drives to download and install other games. Ideal to avoid having to delete games that you don’t like and that take up a lot of space.