How to Upgrade PS4 Pro to SSD Drive - Quick and Easy!

in this video I'm going to show you how and why to upgrade the hard drive in this PS4 Pro to an SSD hey everybody it's Chris from family geekery and today we've got this PS4 Pro here and as I'm starting to transition more and more gameplay to my PS5 I want to kind of get the PS4 Pro here into a state that I don't have to worry about having you know this thing dangling off the side of it you know containing all my games so in this video we're going to show you how to install an upgraded hard drive a bigger hard drive in this case happen to be an SSD now why SSD does it make things faster well maybe yes maybe no some things may be a little faster but overall it's not going to be so much a matter of speed it's just a matter of if I was going to buy a bigger hard drive for this then it makes sense to buy a two and a half inch SATA SSD because they're making the ssds cheaper they're making them bigger you can get them in sizes like 500 gigabytes one terabyte two terabytes even four terabytes so we're going to go ahead and put two terabytes in this PS4 Pro here and that way I can kind of Whittle down the games that I had on here this thing is a four terabyte and it wasn't even close to being full so I'm just going to take the games that I want and get them all inside this machine here so I don't have to worry about that dangling out of the back anymore so to get this done we get three basic steps step one is to back up our games off of the PS4 onto some kind of external media step two is actually physically removing the old hard drive putting in the new hard drive and then step three is going to be restoring the games and the software the operating software onto the PS4 Pro now to get this done we're going to need a couple things first we're going to need a USB drive this one happens to be eight gigabytes that's going to be plenty big enough that's going to be to copy the new operating system off the internet and get it transferred onto our PS4 after we get the new Drive in there second we're going to obviously need the new drive in this case it's a Time Tech two and a half inch SSD and this is a two terabyte I've used a lot of these for different types of upgrades and they've all worked out great I'll have links to a couple different sizes down in the notes below and then we're going to need some kind of a drive to back up our data so depending on how much games you have on here is going to determine the size of what you need so you may get like a USB drive like this it may just be a big thumb drive you can get like a one terabyte thumb drive what I'm going to be using is going to be an external enclosure within nvme SSD in here I'm going to use that to back up the data again it just has to be the right size and we're going to see in the settings here on the screen it's going to tell us how much we have to back up and that's going to determine what we need to plug in to back it up so now that we've got all the parts assembled that we're going to need let's go ahead and get started so like I said step one is going to be backing up the games off of the old hard drive and to do that I've got my portable SSD plugged into the front just in one of the USB ports up front here and we need to do that before we go into the backup settings so what we're going to do is we're going to go over to our settings we're going to scroll down to system and then we're going to scroll down to backup and restore and then from here we're going to select backup PS4 now once we do that it's going to look to see what's on the hard drive and this one is pretty clean this one doesn't have very much on it just one game so you can see we've got the applications some save data captures themes settings and the biggest is obviously going to be your application so if you have filled up this old one terabyte or 800 you know gigabyte drive then this number is going to be a lot bigger and the device that you're going to plug into it is obviously going to have to be a lot bigger so in this case if you want to see what's in there you can see all the applications that you have and you can come through here and you can select or deselect some of the ones that you may not want to back up but I'm just going to leave this as default and it says that the free space after backing up on this drive and this is a two terabyte external drive it's way overkill for what we need but I had it sitting around so that's what I'm going to use and then once we're ready we just hit next we can give it a description if we want but I'm just going to hit backup and it's going to start by rebooting the PS4 and then start copying the files over so after it reboots it's going to start backing everything up now obviously the amount of time this takes is going to be varied depending on how much you're backing up and the speed of the device that you have plugged in to your USB port all right now that's complete and this is a good time to remind you that every time this PlayStation reboots you're going to have to hit the PlayStation button again on your controller before it wakes it up and at this point you can hit OK and then the PlayStation is going to reboot again it's going to ask you to hit that PlayStation button again and then you can log back in and we're back where we started so now that we've backed up the information onto the hard drive the next thing we need to do is look at our trophies and if you have any trophies on here that you want to save you need to make sure that you back them up and you can hit the option button and sync with PlayStation Network so we want to back those up to the PlayStation Network now obviously this will only work if you have a Playstation network account that you're logged into if you're just logged in as a guest then this information won't be saved it doesn't get saved on the USB and without a cloud account it won't get saved there either so once you have gone and saved all your trophies then we're done with this PS4 we're going to shut this thing all the way down by going over to the power going down to power options and then we're going to turn off we don't want to enter into rest mode because we're going to turn it all the way off and we're going to unplug everything and take that old hard drive out all right so the next step is going to be physically removing the old hard drive and putting the new hard drive in its place so I've again powered this thing all the way down unplugged all the cables from the back and plugged to power and the HDMI and this right here is going to be what allows us access to that drive so with the thing turned upside down staring at it this way we're going to grab this right side right here of this plastic and just pull it out like that that's going to give us access to this little screw here so take a small screwdriver Philip said and we're gonna loosen that screw bring it all the way out and then from there you should just be able to grab this right here and pull it straight out now one little trick that I've seen that if you can't quite get your finger under there or if it's going to hurt too much you can't pull is to take an old like USB cable or something and then putting it up in there and then pulling it that way so after you take that out we're going to take this old drive out of this casing with the four screws on either side and pay attention to how it came out and how the connectors look because when we put the new one in we want to make sure that the connectors are lined up the same exact way so in this case we got the circuit board on the bottom so I'm going to have this label on the bottom I'm going to put it in right there so let me take these four screws out put the new drive in and I'll be right back all right so I've taken the old drive out put the new Drive in you'll notice that the new Drive is in my case a lot skinnier so you will have a little bit of a an air gap there which is fine you just have to kind of line up the holes and put the screws in and this is good to go now as far as the old drive goes remember we haven't done anything to this yet so a good thing to do is kind of label this I'll take a sharpie and put PS4 Pro on here or something and set that aside in a safe place because worst case scenario if our installation goes bad with this new drive then all we have to do is take this one put it back in and the PlayStation is back to exactly where it was when we stopped so with that being said I'm going to go ahead and take this and slide it back in so we're going to line it back up we're going to push it all the way in until we know that it's made good connection with the back there and then we should have one screw left that we're going to put right back in its place to hold that hard drive in there with that back in its place we can go ahead and replace this plastic shroud by kind of starting on the left side and then snapping it back in on the right so now the PlayStation is done the next step is going to be restoring the system operating system on there and restoring our games back to the hard drive all right so this next step is going to require a PC so I've got a Windows laptop here that I'm going to be using you could do this also with a Mac computer but you're just going to go to this link and I will have this link down in the description below and once you get to this link make sure that you do not do this one the PS4 console update file we're going to skip past that and get to the PS4 reinstallation file so this is going to be just a file that we're going to put onto this USB drive that I've got in here so we're just going to click on that and allow it to download it'll be called ps4update.pop so we're going to let that download Once that's done we're going to drag that right onto the USB drive all right now that the file is done downloading I've got my USB drive plugged in here that's this one right here and we do need to make sure that that is formatted as FAT32 so I meant to mention that before with whatever drive you use to back up your data before it needs to be either FAT32 or xfat it's probably going to be xfat if it's a large drive so this one is formatted as FAT32 you can always double check that by going to properties and seeing that right here is the file system so once we get this drive in here we need to create a folder so new folder we're going to call that PS4 and then we want to go into that folder there and create a folder called update it's a new folder update and then we're going to take this file that we downloaded from Sony and we are going to drag that right into that update folder and let that copy now if you bought a cheap USB 2 thumb drive like this one it's going to take a minute or so to copy over but go ahead and let that copy and I'll be back when it's done all right so once that's done copying we're just going to double check to make sure it did find its way into the update folder and it did so we can go ahead and get out of there and eject this disk and we can take that out of the computer and we are done with the computer so let's go ahead and take this and get it loaded up onto our PS4 all right so I've taken the PS4 I've plugged in the HDMI and the power cable again up front here I've got the USB drive that we just made in Windows and then here's the USB to micro USB cable because we need to plug in the DualShock controller and because we are updating the software it's kind of forgotten that this controller exists so we're going to plug it in by cable first and to get this done we're going to go over here to the power button and we need to boot this in safe mode so to boot this in safe mode we're going to push this power button we're going to hold it in and wait for two beeps after the second beep we can let go so there's the first beep there's a second beep and now I can release so this will boot it up into safe mode so the first thing it says is connect a DualShock controller using a USB cable that's what we did and press the PS button so I got that and then we've got a menu of options here with only one thing that we can really do and that is initialize PS4 so that's gonna like it says reinstall the system software so let's hit okay on that says connect to USB storage device that has the update file now that's what we just plugged into the front that's the one that we created in Windows and whatever the newest version that you downloaded right from the Sony site is going to be the right version so we're going to go ahead and select OK and hopefully at this point it's going to find that file that's on that USB drive remember we had to put it in the PS4 slash update folder make sure it's in there so if it doesn't find it you can just go ahead and reboot and try this again but hopefully it finds it on your first try so it looks like it found the file and it says this PS4 will be initialized all users and data will be deleted are you sure you want to continue now of course we do because that's a brand new disk in there so it's not erasing anything it's just copying over a brand new disk and we're just going to allow this to go ahead and do its thing it's going to probably reboot a couple times and then I'll catch you up when it's done so here it is actually installing the update so just like any other time you're installing software do not turn off the PS4 make sure you keep it turned on the whole time and I'll check back when this is done all right so after the update it rebooted a couple times and we are now at the screen that it probably looks like just like it did when you first took this thing out of the box so it says plug in your cable hit your PlayStation button we've already got that cable plugged up and now we can go ahead and step through the setting up the PS4 all right and we are all the way back to the PS4 home screen so now I have unplugged the update disk and plugged in our backup disk so now we want to head over to settings scroll all the way down to system backup and restore just like we did before this time we're going to do restore PS4 so it finds this right on that disk you have to make sure that that disk is plugged in first or else it won't find anything and this is the backup file that we used just to back this up a few minutes ago and we want to go ahead and restore that says the PS4 will be restored after restoration starts the PS4 will not return to the current state are you sure you want to continue so we're going to go ahead and hit yes to that and it's going to do its thing it's going to restore restart a couple times and copy that data over now this is where a faster Drive is really going to help out this smaller USB to drive was fine for our system update but for this type of data you definitely want to have something that's USB 3 or 3.1 all right so after that copied everything over it rebooted again wants us to hit the button log back in and now we can see that that Batman game that we put in there is back there again so everything is copied over if you had more than one game obviously they'll all copy over the everything that you backed up so at this point we are done we have successfully upgraded the hard drive in our PS4 and restored everything back onto it hopefully this was helpful to you if you've got something besides the PS4 Pro if you've got either the the old fat one or the skinny one I've got videos for both of those I'll go ahead and Link them down below as well hopefully this helped you out if it did give me that thumbs up that helps out the channel a lot and if you like this type of stuff and you want to see more go ahead and hit that subscribe button but thank you as always for watching and until next time peace out and geek out [Music] thank you

Channel: FamilyGeekery

Views: 9,430

Keywords: PS4 Pro SSD, PS4 Pro Upgrade, PS4 SSD Upgrade, PS4 Hard Drive Upgrade, PS4 disc replacement, ps4 pro, playstation 4 pro, ssd ps4, how to upgrade ps4 hdd to ssd properly, how to upgrade the ps4 with a ssd

Id: EFu41GtZaLM

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023