Can I Play Ps4 Games From External Hard Drive

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A tale of failures. I wanted to copy a PS4 game I have off the internal hard drive onto a USB drive, so I could copy it onto a second console instead of redownloading 60GB+ worth of stuff. This turns out to be impossible.

How To Copy Ps4 Games Cd To Hard Drive

Press the X button to add a checkmark in the checkbox for the saved data you want to copy, and then select Copy. You must be signed in with the same account used when you first copied the saved data. If you backed up your saved games to the cloud using PlayStation Plus, you can safely restore them now. The disc IS copied to the hard drive. But you still need the disc in the drive to play. This is for copy protection purposes. MS didn't want to do this but the fans demanded it. If you didn't need the disc in the drive, you could just install the game and then give the disc to your friends and they could install it for free. They use a customized derivative of one of the.Nix filesystems (the PS3 & PS4 OSes are.Nix based afterall). Hence why you can't access the HDD when connected to a Windows system (the majority of.Nix systems would also have a hard time accessing the HDDs as well - they'd lack support for the customized filesystem).

Since version 5.50 the PS4 has gotten a lot friendlier about supporting USB drives. Among other things you can relatively easily plug in a USB drive and copy user data (like game saves) to and from it. The PS4 will do this with any exFAT or FAT32 disc, like your garden variety flash drive.

You can also move a game from the internal hard drive to a USB. Key point there: move, not copy. Copy is explicitly not allowed. You can only move a game to disc if the disc is formatted as "extended storage" for the PS4. I thought I'd be clever and move the game to an external drive, make a clone, then move it back. But you can't do that easily. The extended storage volume doesn't even have a meaningful partition table, no filesystem I can mount. I suppose I could make a block level clone of the disk but that's too much trouble. (It's probably just some slightly bent version of a standard FreeBSD or Windows filesystem, but I'm not going to waste time researching that.)

Copy

One last option PS4 supports is to back up your whole console to an external disc, then restore it to a different console. You can also clone one PS4 to another directly over a LAN. However in both cases the destination PS4 gets entirely wiped and reconfigured, it's not suitable for making a copy of a game.

The stupid thing about all this is Sony probably still thinks it's doing some useful copy protection. It's not, the copy protection is entirely keyed now to your online account. They're just making it awkward for power users to do reasonable things.

Sony's PlayStation 4 can run many of its next-gen games in full 1080p high-definition and at 60 frames per second, but to achieve that, it installs every game to its hard drive.

In an extensive PlayStation Blog update today, Sony revealed a ton of information about its upcoming system, which debuts Nov. 15 for $400. The company revealed its launch-day lineup and confirmed that the console won't support external hard drives. Now we are learning that the system will need to install every game it plays to its hard drive — that includes disc-based Blu-ray titles.

"All PS4 Blu-ray disc games must be cached to the hard drive to ensure a smooth gaming experience," reads Sony's PS4 blog. "However, certain titles may not require you to wait for the game data to be fully cached before starting gameplay. In order to start playing disc-based games, users will need to insert the game disc into PS4 just like on the [PlayStation 3] system."

We've reached out to Sony to see if it knows which games will support play even while they're installing. We'll update with any new information.

Can You Copy Ps4 Games From Disc To Hard Drive Time

Can you copy ps4 games from disc to hard drive disk

This could lead to a situation where players are filling up their 500GB standard hard drives rather quickly. Modern games, before downloadable content, can take up anywhere from 1GB to 50GB, and that could lead to a lot of headaches if the PS4 forces people to start shuffling around data before they can play a new release.

Can You Copy Ps4 Games From Disc To Hard Drive

It's possible that the system could automatically wipe old cache files like a DVR does with old shows you recorded and never watched. Again, we've reached out to Sony to determine if this is the case.

This forced-install process does bring up other questions, like what happens if you rent a game and want to buy it after playing it? Couldn't you just purchase the license and continue playing with the data you installed to the hard drive? That makes sense, but it doesn't work like that.

"In this [renting] example, you would have to delete the disc-install data and fully install the digital version of the game," reads the PlayStation Blog.

Can You Copy Ps4 Games From Disc To Hard Drive Disk

Can You Copy Ps4 Games From Disc To Hard Drive

Can You Copy Ps4 Games From Disc To Hard Drives

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