If you suffer the embarrassment of having a small disc, and a regularly teased by your friends who have huge discs, then your prayers have been answered. PlayStation 4 Firmware 4.5, which is about to go in to beta, will support external hard drives.
You will be able to connect a USB 3.0 external hard drive up to 8TB, and you can use it for everything, and yes, that include game installs. You can also move games currently installed on your PS4 hard drive to the external drive.
If you’re a PSVR owner then 4.5 will bring another new feature, you will also be able use your PS4 to play 3D Blu-ray discs and watch them in 3D on the headset. The Quick Menu is also getting a refresh, and you can set custom backdrops using screenshots.
Sony say they will reveal a release date in the next few weeks.
UPDATE: As spotted by NeoGAF, 4.5 also includes a “boost mode” for those with a PS4 Pro. It is appears that standard PS4 games with a variable frame rate would be more stable, although if a frame rate is locked it would not improve the game above the lock. For example a game locked to 30fps but dips down to 20fps in some situations would be improved, but the frame rate would never exceed 30fps.
tonyyeb
Upto 8gb?! Some save files aren’t as small as that!
Tuffcub
SHUSH.
Robothamster
I just KNEW that Sony would add this feature just weeks after I went and swapped my 500gb to a 2TB drive…
Tuffcub
Well if you KNEW why did you do the swap? That was silly ;)
Robothamster
Ah, but if I never did the swap, they may never have added the feature. Chicken and Egg time.
Youles
He did it for the greater good. We’re grateful, man.
MrYd
So now if you’re suffering from a small disc, you can pay for an enormous disc and use both at once. Which educational videos on the internet lead me to believe is twice as much fun and remarkably easy to just slip the extra one in.
And before I go any further with that, can I just point out it’s not “up to 8gb”. Because that would be tiny and no use at all. It’s “up to 8 inches”.
No, 8Tb. Don’t know what I was thinking there.
Tuffcub
I have no idea what you are talking about.
bunimomike
TB not Tb, ya landlubber! *shakes wooden arm in anger*
Sammy
8 Terabits, huh? So that’s like what, just your regular ol’ 1″? I mean, 1TB?
TheShepanator
I wish they would do an interface refresh like microsoft have done in the past, I’ve been playing some old ps3 games recently and the XMB interface is so much better.
The ps4 UI isn’t totally awful, but there’s loads of little things that could do with improvements. Like why can I only preview my top 3 online friends without clicking through to the friends list which can take a few seconds to load? Why is the playstation store SO UNRESPONSIVE? Why can’t we choose how to organise the tiles on the main screen?
Phizzy
Why can’t we choose how to organise the tiles on the main screen, by, say, adding them to named folders? I wish they could’ve added that in the update on the 13th of September last year.
TheShepanator
Let’s fix the problem by making the user have to navigate through another level of the menu tree! Yaaaaay!
Or, y’know, they found just make the interface not suck.
tactical20
Result I never bothered swapping my hdd! Now can someone point me to the cheapest 8TB external drive please?!
Pitcher-T
I currently have an external 5tb hdd connected to my PC.
I’m assuming I couldn’t use it for both pc and ps4?
I’m guessing ps4 will want to format it for security purposes.
Good news either way, I was only thinking this morning about the nightmarish large downloads ive done on my slow Internet. Doom and Hitman come to mind at over 120gb combined!
gernboes
I would guess you can use it for both if you made two partitions…
Pitcher-T
Good point I didn’t even think of that.
Fingers crossed. This is the first time I’ve considered entering the firmware beta but hopefully I get access to it.
leeroye
With the Xbox one it wipes the entire disk, i would guess the PS4 will do similar.
Youles
Since I was kindly bought a Pro (1TB) recently, I don’t really have the need for an external HDD. But I would be good to put ALL my completed/deleted games on an external HDD for when I want to dip into a game of Extinction on CoD Ghost without having to download 20,000 patches and DLCs. Might be a nice way to store a lot of the collection for ease, and keep my current stuff on the 1TB.
Anyone know if an external HDD will have to be paired/encrypted to your Primary PS4? As another good use for an external drive would be for me to be able to quickly access a collection of games on either PS4.
camdaz
About ‘boost mode’.
Mark Cerny said about the PS4 Pro’s GPU “is using a “double-sized one.” In effect, the new console has a second, identical GPU configured next to the original” and “Because the new console has “the old GPU next to a mirror version of itself,” Sony can support existing games with a simple trick: “We just turn off the second GPU,””.
Does that mean boost mode will use both GPUs for non Pro games?
Stefan L
The key words are “in effect”. The Pro isn’t two bootstrapped GPUs, but rather a new design with twice as many compute units. When playing standard PS4 games, the Pro just uses half the compute units.
Code is optimised to the specific GPU and CUs though, so just “turning on” the other CUs isn’t useful unless the game knows to use them.
Chances are Boost Mode just uses the higher clocked CPU cores instead and removes that more common bottleneck in the PS4.
camdaz
Yeah I realized it wasn’t two bootstrapped GPUs, that would more than likely cause more bottlenecks. I should have put ‘use all the extra compute units’ in last sentence.
The boost mode is for unpatched games so your probably right about the higher clock speeds.
camdaz
*Probably right = dead right :}
“When activated, Boost Mode “lets PS4 Pro run at a higher GPU and CPU clock speed in order to improve gameplay on some PS4 games that were released before the launch of PS4 Pro” http://www.theverge.com
May also improve load times, which will be welcome.
nobby3687
i thought this might be happening as when i bought my pro and looked on the back above the USB is hdd which had me thinking!!
So glad I kept my 5tb hdd from when I traded my xbox one.
nobby3687
And I’ve just been a cry for the beta trial get in Sony!!!
nobby3687
Accepted*
homerjnick
Interesting…is that the gauntlet of challenge laid down to hackers then?
Because Sony seem to be saying that the PS4 is unhackable so feel free to put games on an external HD….the reason the PS3 never got that was because it would be too easy to pirate games after it was hacked.
I’d suspect a few groups might ramp up their efforts in this now…