Which ps4 external hhd should i get?

[centurion_08]

Hi.

 

Long story short. I want to step up my storage game on my ps4. After reading a bunch of articles i found these 3 as a best and common option.

 

Seagate Expansion 4TB

Seagate PS4 GameDrive 4TB

WD My Passport 4 TB

 

Which one you recon i should get?

 

Please advice.

 

Kind Regards.

[Stefan Payne]

32 minutes ago, centurion_08 said:

Hi.

 

Long story short. I want to step up my storage game on my ps4. After reading a bunch of articles i found these 3 as a best and common option.

 

Seagate Expansion 4TB

Seagate PS4 GameDrive 4TB

WD My Passport 4 TB

 

Which one you recon i should get?

 

Please advice.

 

Kind Regards.

Whatever, PS4 supports any external USB3.0 drive. So go with your taste. 

People say that they trust WD more...

 

My personal oppionion is to get a 2TB HDD internally (because its the biggest ones that fit) and an external SSD and use the 4TB for Backups (has to be exFAT Filesystem)

[B16CXHatch]

With as many USB connectors I've seen broken over the years, my recommendation is always to buy a decent enclosure and put a standard SATA drive in it. WD a few years ago started integrating the USB connector and associated electronics directly to the drive itself. No SATA connector to fall back on if you accidentally break the USB port on it. I believe Seagate does the same thing.

 

If you don't want to do that and assuming both Seagate and WD construct their drives in a similar manner, WD. In my experience, WD tends to be more reliable than Seagate. Also, just reading the reviews on Newegg, the Seagate Expansion series does not appear to be as well received as the WD Passports.

 

Of course, you could also buy a 3rd party brand like LaCie or Buffalo. They'll typically use off the shelf drives with SATA to USB adapters on them. The only problem is you don't know what drive you're getting.

[Stefan Payne]

1 hour ago, B16CXHatch said:

The only problem is you don't know what drive you're getting.

True but that is usually Toshiba for whatever reasons...

That is how I percieved it.

[GFuelBoi]

On 9/28/2018 at 6:42 PM, centurion_08 said:

Hi.

 

Long story short. I want to step up my storage game on my ps4. After reading a bunch of articles i found these 3 as a best and common option.

 

Seagate Expansion 4TB

Seagate PS4 GameDrive 4TB

WD My Passport 4 TB

 

Which one you recon i should get?

 

Please advice.

 

Kind Regards.

I would say the Seagate ps4 game drive

[Stefan Payne]

2 hours ago, GFuelBoi said:

I would say the Seagate ps4 game drive

Only because of the looks.

Wich is a valid reason, if that is the deciding factor.

 

Though its just a bit more expensive than the normal Seagate ext. HDDs...

 

But in the end, its a throw the dice game, I don't believe either of those is a wrong choice...

 

BUT: 

If it is about performance, I'd prefer a 3,5" ext. HDD...

[ono]

I'd go with whatever you can get cheaper. For me that tends to be Seagate lately. Anecdotally it seems to be its the enclosure that will likely fail over the HDD itself. So far it has been regular old SATA drives in my WD/Seagate externals, so I haven't had any trouble extracting the actual working drives out. I didn't know some models may not be SATA drive as a posted above mentioned, so maybe you'll want to build your own or at least research your particular model.

 

One thing I do know, but not sure if it applies to all WD models, is that they encrypt the drive or something. So if you pull it out of the enclosure into a new one (or use SATA directly), you'd need to reformat. So there won't be a way to recover your data if a WD enclosure fails. Not a big deal in this PS4 case since it just means you'd have to re-download/install games. I'm pretty sure all the save files are on the internal drive, and you should back that up too if you're not using the PS Plus cloud backups.

[B16CXHatch]

7 hours ago, ono said:

I'd go with whatever you can get cheaper. For me that tends to be Seagate lately. Anecdotally it seems to be its the enclosure that will likely fail over the HDD itself. So far it has been regular old SATA drives in my WD/Seagate externals, so I haven't had any trouble extracting the actual working drives out. I didn't know some models may not be SATA drive as a posted above mentioned, so maybe you'll want to build your own or at least research your particular model.

 

One thing I do know, but not sure if it applies to all WD models, is that they encrypt the drive or something. So if you pull it out of the enclosure into a new one (or use SATA directly), you'd need to reformat. So there won't be a way to recover your data if a WD enclosure fails. Not a big deal in this PS4 case since it just means you'd have to re-download/install games. I'm pretty sure all the save files are on the internal drive, and you should back that up too if you're not using the PS Plus cloud backups.

It's very rare for 2.5" drives from first party manufacturers to be off the shelf SATA drives in an enclosure now. If any of them do it, it's Toshiba cause I haven't seen a Seagate or WD that didn't have the USB port integrated directly on the drive in years. I'm willing to bet the Toshiba's are probably like that now too. It's pretty much only third party brands like LaCie or Buffalo that use SATA drives. That's why I typically put together my own. Got several good Orico enclosures on the cheap a while back and just slap spare drives into them. Since I replace almost every internal drive of everything with SSDs, I have plenty of HDDs to put in them.

 

Now, 3.5" drives I wanna say still use enclosures with SATA to USB adapters cause they're not trying to make them as small as possible. Nobody buys those much anymore, so I don't really know. I haven't had to crack one open for a recovery in a while. All mine are either ancient LaCie or iOmega units with Samsung drives in them or enclosures with WD drives.

 

As for the encryption, with WD, the regular Passports lack the hardware encryption. The Passport Ultras are what have it. When I use to work at an office store, selling the Ultras was a bit of a rarity as they are more expensive. We were in a bit of a low income town, so cheap is what sold.

[ono]

On 10/5/2018 at 6:19 PM, B16CXHatch said:

Now, 3.5" drives I wanna say still use enclosures with SATA to USB adapters cause they're not trying to make them as small as possible. Nobody buys those much anymore, so I don't really know. I haven't had to crack one open for a recovery in a while. All mine are either ancient LaCie or iOmega units with Samsung drives in them or enclosures with WD drives.

Yeah, I wasn't clear I was talking about 3.5" drives. That's primarily what I have for big 6-8 TB drives for media and internal drive backups. Those would be overkill for a PS4 or Xbox One. Not to mention the hassle of needing to power the drive. I've never torn down a 2.5" portable drive. I do have one that has connection issues at times, but I'm not going to bother salvaging it since it's and old 250 GB one. It'll be nice to upgrade it once it fails to something larger.