Why Reformat Ps4 Hard Drive For Pc
As the successor of PS3, a home video game console, the PlayStation 4 owns better hardware settings and usually comes with a 500GB capacity. With time goes by, the PS4 hard drive will be filled up quickly because of the large games and files. Thus, you can replace the PS4 hard disk with a new, larger, speedier one. If everything goes well on the new PS4 disk, what can you do with the old PS4 hard drive? For most users, they may want to use the old PS4 hard drive as an internal or external storage device for Windows PC to expand the storage space.
However, it is easy to use the old PS4 hard drive on PC as expected and many users find the Windows wonât recognize this hard drive, so they come to online forums and ask for help . Therefore, it is necessary to reformat the PS4 or PS3 hard drive to a proper file system that can be recognized by Windows operating system.
A Brief Introduction To Ps4
Sonyâs eighth-generation gaming console Play Station 4 is the successor of PS3, which was released to the public on November 15, 2013. Upon its launch, PS4 became the most powerful console in the world, which had times the speed/accuracy that PS3 offered, which refined the industry with countless features than ever before. It came with an 8-core AMD Jaguar C.P.U with an 800MHz AMD Radeon GPU and 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, which initially had the internal storage of 500GB.
However, the one terabyte version was released two years later in 2015 to tackle the market pressure, which some felt still wasnât enough as the user had to delete their old games to store new ones. Furthermore, Sony introduced a software upgrade, which allowed the users to store their games in an external hard drive and enabled them to save up to 8 TB of additional data.
What You Need To Copy Movies From Usb To Ps4
First of all, you need a USB flash drive. If your USB is not compatible specially for PS4.
Secondly, USB Flash Drive must be formatted to FAT32.
For your information, you need at least 2GB USB drive for holding an average movie file. You can go with higher GBs like 16 or 32 if you like to store more movies on your drive.
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Restore Your Data And Reinstall Your Games
You will need to log into your PlayStation account again, as if you were setting up a new PS4 for the first time. Before continuing, though, you need to restore the data you backed up by inserting the USB drive and heading to Settings > System > Back Up and Restore > Restore PS4.
If you backed up via PS Plus, head to Settings > Application Saved Data Management > Saved Data in Online Storage > Download to System Storage instead.
You then need to re-download and/or re-install your games, but once thats done, you should be able to hop back in like you never leftand with shorter loading times getting you in to play as fast as possible.
Restore Your Game Data
Connect the external hard drive containing your backup data.
From the home menu, go to Settings > System> Back up and Restore.
Choose Restore PS4,;select the backup file and follow the on-screen instructions.
When your data is successfully restored, the system with restart one last time.
When the PS4 home menu comes back up, it should look identical to how it did before the hard drive swap change. Your user profile, save data, and trophies will all be intact.
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Formatting A Ps4 External Hdd For Maintenance/repairing
If the PS4 external hard drive is behaving weirdly, like it is very slow and causing crashes to the system, or youre having observable errors when playing the games installed on the PS4 extended storage, that all indicates that you need to format the PS4 external hard drive.
Formatting a corrupted/malfunctioning PS4 external hard drive will restore its original performance and eliminate any issue the external HDD undergoes. For this reason, if you ever have a performance issue with the PS4 external hard drive, the very first thing to try is to full format it on a PC.
You can read more on the PS4 hard drive format to understand the general concept of this matter.
Find The Initialization Option In Settings
Scroll all the way to the bottom from within the Settings menu. Click on Initialization and youll be presented with a few more options. For the purposes of this guide, you only need to worry about the bottom two options ; well be skipping Clear Learning Dictionary. Below that, youll see Restore Default Settings, which;will clear your saved settings data and return the PS4 to its factory settings, but it wont wipe your hard drive.
The other option, Initialize PS4, is the big one that will clear your hard drive of data, including downloaded games, saved game data, and anything else youve added to the console since buying it. This will restore your PS4 to the pristine condition it was in when it came out of the box.
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How To Format Ps4 Hard Drive For Pc In Windows 10/8/7
If youve recently upgraded the hard drive in your PS4 and want to use it on your computer youll find that the drive doesnt appear in Windows Explorer.
This is because the PS4 uses a format not recognised by Windows.
To make it work in Windows youll need to remove the existing partitions and create a new partition that is recognised by Windows.
These steps will show how using Windows 10, but will be similar for Windows 7 and 8. This process DOES NOT require you to install third-party software, a potential source of malware.
Formatting A Hard Drive For Ps4 On Windows:
The procedure of changing the file system of your hard drive to exFAT is as follows:
- Plug your removable disk into the PC.
- Open Disk Management by typing âdskmgmtâ in the Windows search bar.
- Locate your external hard drive from the list of disks and right-click on it.
- A dialogue box will appear, change the name of your disk and its format before clicking OK.
- Wait for a few minutes as Disk Management formats your drive to exFAT.Moreover, you can format your removable storage device to exFAT by using Command Prompt. Here are the step-by-step instructions:
- After plugging the device to the PC, type cmd in the taskbarâs search tab and run the application as an administrator.
- Type and enter Diskpart from the keyboard.
- After command prompt is turned into disk partition mode, type list disk to view all your drives in the utility.
- Select your disk by entering select disk 2.
- Enter clean, once command prompt cleans the disk, enter âcreate partition primary.â
- Type and enter format FS=exfat. It will take some minutes to format the drive. You can assign the newly formatted disk a letter by entering âassign letter J:â
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Format External Hard Drive To Fat32 For Ps4/ps3 On Pc
If you need to format external hard drive with FAT32 file system for PS4/PS3, you can ask the help of a third-party partition manager, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. It allows you to convert external hard drive to FAT32 without formatting and format a large external hard drive to FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, Ext2, Ext3, and Ext4 on PC. It can also be applied to format USB flash drive or SD card. Free download the software and see how it works.
Step 1. Connect the external hard drive to your computer; download, install, and run AOMEI Partition Assistant. In the main interface, right-click the partition on the external hard drive, choose âFormat Partitionâ.
Step 2. Among listed file systems, choose FAT32 and click âOKâ.
Step 3. Youâll return to the main interface. Confirm the pending operation and click âApplyâ to perform this operation.
PS.: If your external hard drive is unallocated, you can right-click the unallocated space and choose âCreate Partitionâ to format external hard drive with FAT32 file system.
How To Choose The Default Hard Drive
Once youve successfully set up your external hard drive, go ahead and hook it up to your PS4. From there, you can now choose the default hard drive to store your game downloads.
- On the PS4 home screen, go to Settings> Storage.
- Choose System Storage >Applications.
- Choose Move to System Storage.
- Tick the checkbox beside thegame titles that you want to save to the default hard drive.
- Choose Move, and click OK.
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Format External Hdd For Ps4
PS4 system doesn’t require much from an external hard drive to be approved. Almost every modern external hard drive will work seamlessly without any issue at all with PS4 system as long as it supports USB 3.0 connectivity and is between 250gb and 8tb of storage 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 to the SSD. Suppose that you plug a USB flash drive to your PS4, this game console fails to read your USB flash drive. And it means these test results hold up even when the drive’s filled to the brim. If you’ve got any gameplay videos or screenshots you want to keep, you’ll want to move them to your USB drive, too. Screenshots and videos are categorised by game, and you can either delete individual screenshots or videos, or delete all the files linked to a given game at once.
New Support For Ps4 External Storage
Whats more exciting? Sony now allows you to use a PS4 external hard drive with USB 3.0 port. You can increase the storage of PS4 for games and apps by getting a Seagate Game Drive or the PS4 USB flash drive. It hands over the power to you for rearranging your schedule to make more free time for games.
After you have been playing for too long on PS4, youll easily find the speed of PS4 is slower than before. This is probably because it takes too much time to load the games and applications saved in the internal hard drive . Thats why an external hard drive is necessary.
Note:
Equipped with large capacity, the external hard drive also allows you to improve movie experience a lot. You can connect an external hard drive to PS4 to watch movies anytime you want.
It comes a long way to make this happen. Now, the days of storing games in and extracting it out of the meager 500 GB internal drive in your PS4/PS4 Pro are finally over.
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Tips To Format An External Hard Drive For Ps4
Below is a step-by-step process on how to format an external
Meanwhile, if youre using a computer running on Windows 8, follow these tips to formatting your PS4 external hard drive:
What Can You Do With An External Hdd On Ps5
You may be wondering why you should buy an external HDD for PS5. The answer is simple: if you’re planning to play a lot of PS4 games on your next-gen console, then you’ll need the additional storage space. With the SSD being relatively small and required for PS5 playback, offloading your backwards compatible PS4 games to an external HDD gives you a dramatic amount of freedom. It also helps with the following: How to Remove Other Storage Space from PS5.
At the time of writing, you can use an external HDD to store and play PS4 games only. All of your Create button Media Gallery content and Saved Data will be stored on the PS5’s SSD. It’s also currently impossible to transfer PS5 games for safekeeping. If you don’t currently have an external HDD you can use, then check out the following link for some recommendations: Best PS5 and PS4 External Hard Drives.
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Way : Format Ps4 External Hard Drive Via Disk Management
Disk Management built in Windows is also a good utility to help you format disk. To format an external hard drive for PS4, please refer to the follwoing steps.;
Step 1: Connect the external hard drive with Windows computer.
Step 2: Press Windows;and R;on the keyboard simultaneously to get the following picture. ;And then input diskmgmt.msc;and then click OK.
Step 3: Get the interface of Disk Management and select the partition on the external hard drive you want to format.
Step 4: Right-click the partition on the disk and then click;Format.
Note:
Step 5: Select File System FAT32 in the new pop-up window for the external hard drive and click OK.
How Difficult Is It To Upgrade My Ps4’s Hard Drive
Whatever drive you choose, the upgrade process is very easy and doesn’t require any technical knowledge. Depending on your internet speed, the file download and drive switch combined shouldn’t take you more than 15-20 minutes.
If you follow these steps, none of your save data or digital games will be lost and your upgrade should ensure that you have plenty of space to store your favorite games and media.
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Connect External Hdd To Ps4
How to connect external HDD to PS4:
How To Use An External Hard Drive On Ps5
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How do you use an external HDD on PS5? You’re almost certainly going to want to connect some kind of external storage device to your PlayStation 5, as its SSD is quite small . It’s worth noting that while you can use an external HDD for backwards compatible PS4 games, you can’t play or store PS5 titles on it. To expand your Console Storage, refer to the following: Which SSD Drives Will Be Compatible with PS5? As part of our PS5 guide, we’re going to reveal how to use an external HDD on PS5.
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Restore From A Backup
From here, select which backup you want, and then press the Restore button. Depending on the drive and size of the backup, this process could take a very long time to complete. Follow the prompts, dont turn off your PS4 during the process, and have patience. Once everything is finished, everything will be back where it belongs.
Begin The Backup Process
To get the ball rolling, youll need to plug in your external drive over USB. It needs to be formatted using FAT32 or exFAT, and if you want to back up a full drive, the external drive should have at least the same capacity as the internal drive.
Launch the Settings app from the PS4s main menu. Select the System option, go down to Back Up and Restore, and then go into the Back Up PS4 sub-menu.
At this point, you may be notified that your trophies cant be backed up. Of course, trophies sync over PSN, so thats not a problem. If youre sure that everything is already synced, just select OK. If you want to make sure that all of your trophies are properly synced, you should back out, launch the Trophies app, and make sure that everything is copacetic before continuing.
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