Sony PlayStation 4 Is Finally Adding Support For External Hard Drive (playstation.com) 45
The Sony PlayStation 4's next system update, out now for beta testers, will allow users to connect an external USB hard drive. From company's blog post: It's easy to upgrade the HDD that came with your PS4, but if you're still looking for more storage space on the console, we've got you covered. With this update, you have the option to store content to an external HDD. Just plug a USB 3.0 HDD into your PS4, and voila, you now have more space on the console.
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Is it existential Friday again already?
captcha: churchly
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I skipped work, therefore I am.
So... (Score:3)
I predict comments about how someone is never buying anything from Sony ever again because "other OS" for the PS3, CD rootkit fiasco, memory stick instead of SD, beta instead of VHS, etc. Pointless rant that dozens of people will reply to, one of which will include movies released by Sony.
Re: So... (Score:1)
I am never buying anything sony ever again because all of the aforementioned shit.
And im still pissed over betamax
Im going to go cry over here in my safe space now.
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And im still pissed over betamax
Why? Without the ruling in Sony v. Universal that found Betamax recorders legal to sell in the United States, there would be no VCR, no DVR, and probably not even camcorders for the amateur market.
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Not necessary. Thankfully, they seem to be doing a great job of wrecking their own company themselves:
https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/01/sony-takes-977m-writedown-movies-have-been-flops-dvds-sales-falling/
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You make it sound like those aren't valid reasons to shun a company.
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I use to purchase sony cameras at garage sales. I have several sony cameras because they have two problems. First is storage. I have 3 that store pictures on 3.5-inch floppy disks. Who has a computer that uses them anymore? I have a couple more that use memory sticks that come in more than one version and are way more expensive than sd cards. Then there is the battery. I guess they could not use the standard aa or aaa batteries. They do not charge in the camera so one needs a separate charger of whic
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Why don't you let Sony treat you badly today? (Score:2)
So this is what the shills have to offer—a blanket and unjustified declaration that people in the know (who presumably read /.) should not only be willing to be treated badly but an attempt at narrowing the scope of allowable debate to exclude reminding people of Sony's horribly bad choices which treat consumers badly ("pointless rant"). Sony's defenders/shills must be seeing the increasing retelling of such stories as a threat, otherwise there would be no need for posts such as the parent post in the
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You've been using it for backup/restore, it looks like you'll be able to actually play games off of it once this patch hits for real.
Always assumed (Score:3)
I just assumed that the reason external drives were forbidden in the first place was for copy protection and to make it harder to hack save game data.
As far as I am aware (and I am not aware of much in this area) some of the more notorious hacks for PS games are from people exporting save game data on older systems to external hard drives then cracking it and re-importing.
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I don't think that's likely to be the case with the PS4. You can already remove the hard drive from the machine pretty easily (and replacing the hard drive is an officially authorised modification that doesn't void your warranty). PS4 hard drives, like PS3 hard drives before them, use an encrypted structure that locks content to the console in question. I'm guessing there will be a requirement to format any external hard drives used in the same way.
This, incidentally, means it is really important to keep ba
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It is almost as trivial to pull the hard drive out of a PS4 if you are a hacker, the root problem is the 2TB limit on laptop hard drives vs. the storage needed for the modern consoles. Hacking was never the issue, I think the concern was more related to game performance and/or they just didn't think anyone would ever need more storage (which is obviously stupid).
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and to make it harder to hack save game data.
You could backup saves to USB key / external drive any time before this.
You couldn't use external drive to expand the console HDD storage, install games on it.
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They were not forbidden though... (Score:2)
I just assumed that the reason external drives were forbidden in the first place was for copy protection and to make it harder to hack save game data.
Since the PS3 I've used an external USB drive to do system and game backups. The PS4 even had a way I could backup saves from individual games, so it seems like I could have edited them after... but I'm also assuming the backups were encrypted in some way. If they just have an encrypted FS it seems like it would work just as well to store game data, I wonde
Finally (Score:3)
Glad to see they are finally fixing this. This was really the one problem that I had with the PS4. The day after I bought my PS4 I upgraded it to a 2TB internal laptop drive, but with every game taking up 40GB plus, it is not that hard to fill up a drive that big, and indeed I recently ran out of space. Contrast this with my Xbone, which I think is the loser in this generation, but at least with Xbone I was able to plug in a 5TB USB3 external drive and was good to go.
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it takes what, 1 hour or something to re-download one these days?
That depends on where you live. If you live within range of 12 Mbps cable or fiber with a data transfer allowance of several hundred GB/mo or larger, redownloads can finish overnight. But if you're stuck on DSL, satellite, or fixed cellular, you'll probably need to stick with discs except for sub-2 GB indie games.
Really? (Score:2)
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Well, you could, with restrictions.
First, it was for media only, and only FAT32 was supported (no NTFS or other filesystem supporting larger than 2GB files).
You could move save games onto it, but only if it wasn't blocked.
Whereas on the Xbone, you could add an external drive and it will appear as internal storage. Thus, even if the internal drive was full, you can still use it as the Xb