Aw man! I can’t wait to download Red Dead Redemption 2 and get my cowboy on!
107GB? Are you kidding me?
Uh! Now I’m going to have to delete Shadow of the Tomb Raider?
This is awful!
Hey everyone and welcome to DIY in 5, the show that makes your DIY tech goals 100% achievable.
I’m Trisha Hershberger and now that our latest gen game consoles have been out for
quite some time, it would be unusual to find someone who hasn’t maxed out their internal storage.
Even if you sprung for the 1TB, with AAA titles being as large as 100 plus GB each...
Argh!! That fills up super fast.
And when you have spent an entire evening downloading a title in the first place,
the last thing you want to do is delete it and potentially having to reinstall it at a later time.
Now, we talked about installing M.2 SSDs into external enclosures in this video,
and these drives will with PS4 and Xbox, but what do you do next?
And what if you don’t want to build your own?
Don’t worry, adding an external SSD to increase storage in a console is super easy
and it even gets you into the game faster! I got you.
Pull up a chair, Xbox One gamers, you’re up first.
Since Microsoft has supported Xbox external storage from the beginning, this is a pretty simple process.
The only requirements are that your drive needs to be at least 256GB and use USB 3.0.
Xbox One can support up to two drives at a time, so provided that you’ve got the bottlecaps,
you can really house a ton of games without needing to worry about maxing out storage.
Simply plug your new SSD into one of the 3 USB ports and you’ll see a pop up letting
you know the drive has been detected.
By default, the drive will only be able to store pictures, music and video files, so
you’ll want to go to settings and format the drive.
Give it a name, set it to be the default location for game and app downloads and you are all set!
Now for my PS4 friends. The process is not terribly different provided
you’ve updated your PS4 firmware in the last year or so.
The 4.5 update brought support for external drives to the Sony ecosystem - huzzah!
The hard drive can be up to 8TB in size, no larger, and like the Xbox it must use USB 3.0.
Unlike the Xbox however, the PS4 will only recognize one external storage device at a time,
even though two can be connected.
So make sure you purchase a big enough SSD for your needs.
It’s also worth noting that you’ll want to directly connect the SSD, not connect it through a hub,
which can be tempting since the PS4 only has two USB ports, but fair warning,
it won’t work if routed through a hub.
Once you’ve connected your SSD to one of the two USB ports, you’ll want to go to
Settings > Devices > USB Storage Devices, then Format as Extended Storage and your SSD
will become the new default destination for games. Voila!
Now whether you are increasing the storage on an Xbox One or PS4, you’ll probably notice
a speed boost when launching games stored on the external storage.
This is because the speed of the both your external drive and the USB connection will
probably be faster than the 5400RPM HDD and SATA connection included in both the Xbox One and PS4.
You’ll notice an even greater increase in speed if you go with an SSD over a traditional hard drive.
Plus, we’re Kingston so we’re kinda partial to SSDs like the HyperX EXO external SSD, no assembly required!
So there you have it!
Storage solutions no matter which side of the console wars you support.
Whether Switch, PlayStation, Xbox or PC, a little extra storage goes a long way.
So what game is hogging all your memory right now?
Cough! - Red Dead Redemption 2 - Let us know in the comments.
I’m Trisha Hershberger and thank you for watching DIY in 5.