Has anyone heard if you can change the hard drive in the PS4 Pro? 1 TB is good but I would like to change it to something bigger. The 4K textures are going to take up even more space and game files are only gonna get bigger. I already swapped my OG PS4 hard drive to a 2 TB and I'm hopping that swapping the hard drive on the PS4 Pro is just as easy.

Probably, but I'd wait to confirm.

Absolutely not!

I won't allow it.

I still haven't found any information online about whether you can change the hard drive. They are adding the ability to transfer information via ethernet cable from any PS4 to another PS4 if they both have the 4.0 firmware.

They had better, because I paid good money for the 2TB drive in my existing PS4, and I sure as heck don't want to "upgrade" but wind up with half the storage space!

If you look at a picture of the back panel, the lower right side looks like a piece of plastic that can be removed that's about the size of the HDD. Where all the Dolby and other legal fine print is.

@thizzle7xu said:

If you look at a picture of the back panel, the lower right side looks like a piece of plastic that can be removed that's about the size of the HDD. Where all the Dolby and other legal fine print is.

You mean they made it even easier....?

Well, I hope so - I have a 2TB drive in my old PS 4. I was planning to wipe my old PS4 drive, put it in my new PS4 Pro and take the 1TB drive and put it in my old PS4. It was going to be some simple brain surgery...or so I hoped.

You guys are right the back panel does look like it has a door for accessing the hard drive but it would be nice to get an official or at least semi official word on it. I can confirm that the Slim PS4 does have a door on the side for accessing the hard drive.

Hey guys, I was wondering the same thing so I tweeted PlayStation and they got back to me confirming that you could. I have asked them sizes etc. but nothing yet. I will keep you posted.

I would not count on being able to move an HDD from another unit and have the data on it work. It didn't work with PS3, I don't think it'll work here.

Forget hard drives. That Sony doesn't have the option of an NVMe SSD is insane. Insane. Even SATA III just isn't fast enough to unleash a good SSD's speed.

Hi peps said I keep you posted....I have been on the case to twitter.....The internal harddrive is replaceable. The physical size of the internal hard drive has not changed so it means anything that fits in your existing ps4 will fit in the pro and slim and visversa, meaning people who have a 2tb in there standard ps4 can put it in the pro and the pro's 1tb in your standard ps4. Even though pro is more powerful and probably easily able to handle more harddrive data, unfortunately Sony tells me that it still has a maximum of 2tb internal storage. 

    After getting all this info, I then asked if the 3rd usb was for external hard drive or more vr in mind, all they said was " the 3rd usb could potentially be used for more memory". I think this means at the moment no, but once release is out there and they have ironed out s one bugs, it's something they want to add. When talking about pro to them, they couldn't stress more about the unison of the standard, slim and the pro ps4s. Which if they do make externa hddl compatibility on one of the ps4's good chance the other 2 won't be far behind. 

Just keep in mind consoles work differently to a pc, SSD helps pc a lot, but not that much in a console, yes your game load time are about 15 seconds faster but that's about it. I put a sata 3 seggate 7200rpm 1tb in to my standard ps4 and it was glitchy so bad that it would crash and wipe my data, this happened to me 3 times, so spent some and put the sata 2 samsung spin point T9 5400rpm and works like a dream better than the original 500gb hdd. I know people that have had the same problem, and when they slowed the hdd down the system worked a lot better.

My point is that faster hard drives are great in computers but when put in the consoles it tends to over limit them, Sony chose these slower hdd for there consoles for a reason and probably had access to faster hard drives during development , remember they had 4 or 5 years to work all this stuff out. Sometimes it helps to listen to them.

Hope this helps

Just wondering is 2TB the largest HDD you can put into a PS4? or can you put in a 3TB or 4TB HDD?

People say on site like these that you can put upto 6tb via sata cable, due to the fact that there isn't a manufacture that makes a physically small enough drive over 2tb yet. Does mean if someone like Samsung or Seagate made a small enough HDD over 2tb it would physically fit but however these people who do this by cable report glitching, slower loading and unstabilty when gaming online.

I think Sony will make a patch once these smaller sized 2tb+ drives become available, when I fitted the 2tb I learnt that only a few months before, that Sony only just made the patch to allow the 2tb drive compatible, the old maximum was 1.5tb back in 2013/2014.

So can't imagine Sony will make us last on 2tb for the rest of the consoles life time. Just not at the moment.

I can't say for sure either way about the space upgrade, but this made me curious. I wonder if PS4 Pro versions of games actually will have 'bigger' textures? I'm expecting probably not because it's such a massive hurdle to even render the screenspace in 4K let alone upping texture res. Also remember that more processing power means you need to 'bake-in' less lighting, etc., so you can have a smaller file size for the game. That's basically how Halo 5 and AC: Unity managed to have such insanely large file sizes for (admittedly good looking) standard console games. So we might actually see even smaller file sizes for a lot of games that aren't really trying to push the envelope.

I'm not a developer, so I could be speaking out my ass, but this is all pretty interesting. Mostly because what the hell are devs really going to do with all this power if they have support the first gen hardware?

NVMe is dope on a PC, but I don't think that having an NVMe drive in the Pro would be worthwhile. I'm not sure what the new processor in the Pro is like, but an SSD in the original PS4 was only a pretty meagre upgrade. To be fair it only supported SATA II to begin with, but a lot of the bottleneck in that system came down to processor and RAM write speeds IIRC.

So I've just brought my nice new PS4pro home and it seems (idiotically) I thought I might be able to just pop the nice 2TB HDD with all my installed games and saves from the old PS4 I just traded in (with its old 500gb drive) into the new box and start rolling.

No such luck.

Sure it all fits etc but I presume the different machines use different sized boot sectors or something as the disk wan't recognised so I've had to reformat and reinstall - probably needed a good clean anyway but lesson learned. Thankfully most of my recent saves were in the cloud - tho not all.

Lesson learned.

@mattswan: Does the console do the reformatting/installing for you or did you need to hassle with USB boot drives and such?

@mattswan: I don't think you were ever able to just swap hard drives, so it makes even more sense you couldn't do ps4 to ps4 pro.

I swapped my ps4 hdd to a 1tb one couple years ago, did the same with my ps3 back in the day. Sucks you can't just swap the hdd from the ps4 to pro, effects my decision to upgrade.

@oursin_360: Really you swapped a used drive to a new console? I thought you always had to do their proper transfer or use a new/formatted drive.

@mattswan: You cannot swap HDDs between Playstation 4s at all. 3s were the same way.

This will suck for someone like Dan Ryckert who wants to use his pimped out drive from his PS4 in his Pro. He'll actually have to migrate all his date back from his new drive to his old PS4 drive, then put the fancy drive in the PS4 Pro, format it and migrate again from the old PS4 to new PS4 Pro.

Ok so this was covered a bit on the Bombcast this week but the perceived wisdom for transferring your nice big HDD between your PS4 and your PS4pro would be:

• BACK UP ALL YOUR GAME SAVES - to USB or cloud
• Deactivate the old PS4 as your primary PS4 via the user accounts section (I also missed this step which mean I had to deactivate "all my consoles" via SEN the website - sorry old PS3)
• Probably sign out - most likely not necessary
• Power down and swap the HDD over to the shiny new PS4pro in the normal way
• Install system software as new installation from your USB drive - and say goodbye to all your old stuff as the HDD wipes and reformats
• Sign in and start downloading all your digitally purchased games, DLC, patches and save data - I have reasonable download speed for ADSL in Australia of around a steady 18mps and thankfully unlimited downloads but this was still a laborious task - obviously I focussed on getting the 4k pimped games down first.
• I was actually a bit flummoxed by a few of the set up particulars I'd forgotten since getting the OG PS4 set up a few years ago, like pushing All Audio through your headphones when plugged in, and I also had to spend a bit of time configuring the Sony Bravia HDR 4k TV to get the 4k flowing all nice but hey all this is part of the fun and makes the payoff all the sweeter once you get it all done.

@maginnovision said:

I swapped the HDD over yes but I did have to reformat it once it was in the new machine. I wasn't able to do the "transfer your PS4" via ethernet thing as I'd traded in my old PS4 to get part-exchange on the PS4pro.

All you need to do is connect an external drive to your current PS4, then use the backup feature (this will save everything - all saves, videos, screenshots, games, and updates). Then swap the hard drive to the PS4 Pro, which will format the drive. Next, you need to connect a usb flash drive with the current PS4 firmware and the external drive with your backup to the PS4 Pro. Then use the restore feature (this could take up to 10 hrs). All of your data will be back, and remember to set your PS4 Pro as the primary system.

I looked into this but it ended up that its just faster to redownload than backup and restore, at 20mb/s it downloads faster from the internet than from a USB backup.

Got my pro today. Doing all the backing up now. Wish me luck.

This is what I need to put on the usb right? https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/system-updates/ps4/#newinstallation

I really hope there will be an option soon to use a USB hard drive. I installed a 2TB HD into my PS4, I don't want to have to do it again for when I eventually buy a pro.

@frostyryan: did it work? I thought you couldn't use a back up from a old ps4 on a pro...

You can use a backup from an old ps4 to the pro. I did this almost 2 months ago when I upgraded my HD to a 2tb Seagate firecuda sshd. Worked like a charm, but the transfer was extremely slow compared to just downloading everything again. Used a 16gb usb that I got when I upgraded my OG ps4 to a 2tb last year. Just had to delete the old info and download the newer update from sonys website.

@mcshank: Awesome, thanks. I have a pro on the way and was now starting to dread the daylong download sessions because all the info I found elsewhere said it wasnt possible unless you do the 'ethernet cable transfer stuff'. Which I wont be able to do as I want my 2tb drive from my og ps4 to move along to my pro. My ps4 downloads 1mb\sec at its fastest (despite the thing being put in dmz and everything) so redownloading 2 terrabytes of stuff takes me goshdarn forever. I dont have a 2tb hdd to back up to though but being able to at least back up 1tb of games that I wont have to redownload could make a big difference.

If I understand correctly you only had 16 gigs of data to back up right? Any idea how long that approximately took to transfer? If transferring 1 tb of data is likely to take more than a day I might as well just redownload all the stuff as you alluded to.