Upgrade your Playstation 4 with a 2TB HDD

The Playstation 4 comes with a 500GB hard-drive and especially as part of the December specials, Sony is releasing discounted downloads which quickly fill up your drive. While 1TB hard-drives are readily available, the choice for cheap, but decent drives is rather slim.

I stumbled on a fascinating aspect, that while in South Africa you will struggle to find many 2TB notebook drives suitable for the PS4, it is very easy (and cheaper) to just purchase a 2,5″ external hard-drive, crack it open and then fit it into the PS4.

To my surprise, the most suitable drive at the moment is the Seagate M9T SpinPoint, which is almost USD 20 cheaper on Amazon if purchased as an external drive compared to the internal drive.

As long as you pick the Seagate M9T SpinPoint 2.5-Inch Internal ST2000LM003, it will work perfectly fine in a Playstation 4 and there is no difference in loading speed compared to the factory drive (I am playing Destiny, GTA, Diablo, The Last of us). Although there are substantially faster 1TB drives out there, the M9T is for me the “goldilocks” of 2TB hard-drives for a Playstation 4.

Warning: Although the replacement of the hard-drive on the PS4 is really super easy, the backup and restore really sucks. The PS4 does not allow a full backup which means that you have to redownload EVERY game and update. The backup and restore of save-games is equally cumbersome, as you have to manually select each game to backup. The same applies if you want to restore from the cloud via your PSN+ account – you can only restore save-games per game and only once the game has installed.