Best external hard drive for PS4

With ballooning game install sizes, storage space is at a premium this console generation. The 500GB or 1TB hard drive that comes as standard in the various PlayStation 4 models may seem like plenty at first, but it fills up quickly. Even upgrading that hard drive is only a temporary fix – the console only supports drives up to 2TB, a limit plenty of players are likely to hit long before the PS5 comes out. 

There’s good news though. PS4 software upgrade 4.5 brought with it support for external hard drives, opening up the potential for limitless storage – you need never uninstall a game or delete a screenshot again.

The PS4 now supports USB 3.0 hard drives up to 8TB, and if you somehow manage to fill that up you can always just buy another (the PS4 won’t support both at once, but you can always swap between them). 

It’s worth bearing in mind that any hard drive you use to install games has to be formatted for the PS4, meaning you won’t be able to use it to store any other files or backups – that’s why you might want to buy a new drive for the purpose, rather than re-use an existing one, unless you know you don’t need it for anything else. 

To find out how to format an external hard drive for the PS4, check out our guide to managing your storage on the console. And if you’re looking to upgrade the internal hard drive, we have a guide for that too. 

A quick word on the list below. All of the drives were testing multiple times on our PC test rig (not on a PS4), but all will be compatible with the console. We’ve also only included drives available in at least 500GB, because anything smaller would fill up too quickly to be of much use. If you want to see more options, check out our larger ranking of the best portable hard drives.