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The fear of hooking up the external hard drive to PS5?

Do you have an external PS4 formatted drive connected to your PS5?


  • Total voters
    27

DinoD

Member
Hello fellow GAFers.

I created this thread as I couldn't find the specific discussion on the topic of PS5 users not wanting to connect their PS4 external HD, for the fear of causing the system instability.

I have had mine hooked up to my launch PS5 since day 1, through one of the rear USB ports, running without any perceived issues. Just recently got into the discussion with 6 other people (online friends) who are all refusing to connect their external HD's to PS5, as they seem to be convinced it will cause the system instability and potentially even brick their consoles. The source(s) of their information is(are) all over the internet. I did some checking and there seems to be a lot of chatter about this. I wanted to know what are the experiences of PS5 owners here on NGAF?

Regards
 
I have a 5tb wd black hdd connected to my ps5 with no issues after I changed a setting that turned off power to usb ports after a certain period of time.

I think it defaulted to 6 hours? Games that were downloading stopped downloading because the port powered off and the ps5 didn't see the hdd. After fixing that setting I've had no further issues.
 

DinoD

Member
I have a 5tb wd black hdd connected to my ps5 with no issues after I changed a setting that turned off power to usb ports after a certain period of time.

I think it defaulted to 6 hours? Games that were downloading stopped downloading because the port powered off and the ps5 didn't see the hdd. After fixing that setting I've had no further issues.
Good point there. I don't use the rest mode on mine so never encountered this scenario.

Thanks.
 

Grinchy

Banned
I wasn't sure either. I did see some comments here back in Nov. When you look on the internet (google) , there seems to be a lot of buzz around this.

Regards
Apparently Spiderman had an issue where going into Rest Mode with the game running and having an active external drive could cause corruption for some people.

It seemed rare enough that I'm not even sure if it was Spiderman or just an instance that could happen to any game in Rest Mode with a drive connected. There have been multiple system updates since then and I can't say I've heard anything about it ever since.
 

Moogle11

Banned
I waited a few weeks to hook mine HDD of PS4 games. Haven’t had any issues. I don’t use rest mode at all still though as that seemed to be linked to most of the issues from what I read and the console and games load so fast I’m not missing much anyway.
 

Entroyp

Member
I wasn't sure either. I did see some comments here back in Nov. When you look on the internet (google) , there seems to be a lot of buzz around this.

Regards

I think that issue was specific to Spiderman. It appears to have been taken care of.
 

HoofHearted

Member
I've had several situations with my external HDD when running games from it.. essentially the PS5 gets into a weird state where the display is switching (BLANK - no image/game visible) between 1080p/4k/HDR10. This ONLY happens when I'm attempting to run a game from external HDD and I walk away for extended period of time.

Only way to address it is force a power off/reboot (most of the time). I've been successful a few times with unplugging the HDMI cable from one port and plugging into another available port.

I'm not sure if it's my TV - or my HDD - but I don't experience any issues at all with running the same game from the internal SSD.

Games experiencing this issue -

GoT
Spider-Man: MM
Spider-Man: RM
GoW

It's an older external HDD (portable Seagate - USB 3.0). I've just stopped using it and will buy another "authorized"/supported SSD once the expansion slot is enabled.

EDIT:

Additional details/notes:
  • Rest mode is disabled (I started doing this initially because there were reports of rest mode bricking the system upon release)
  • Also had to disable HDMI/CEC control on the TV - as apparently the console will go into rest mode (even after disabling it) if you have HDMI-CEC enabled and simply turn off the TV.
Other notes:

  • Other than the HDD issue - the system runs (generally) great - I don't think this is a hardware issue - but an OS / system issue
  • No coil whine (practically silent) - has fan "C" in the console
 
Last edited:

DinoD

Member
I've had several situations with my external HDD when running games from it.. essentially the PS5 gets into a weird state where the display is switching (BLANK - no image/game visible) between 1080p/4k/HDR10. This ONLY happens when I'm attempting to run a game from external HDD and I walk away for extended period of time.

Only way to address it is force a power off/reboot (most of the time). I've been successful a few times with unplugging the HDMI cable from one port and plugging into another available port.

I'm not sure if it's my TV - or my HDD - but I don't experience any issues at all with running the same game from the internal SSD.

Games experiencing this issue -

GoT
Spider-Man: MM
Spider-Man: RM
GoW

It's an older external HDD (portable Seagate - USB 3.0). I've just stopped using it and will buy another "authorized"/supported SSD once the expansion slot is enabled.
Thank you for sharing this. Could this have anything to do with what "BertleTheTurtle" mentioned? Rest mode setting, cutting the power to USB ports after the certain period?
 
Last edited:

HoofHearted

Member
Thank you for sharing this. Could this have anything to do with what "BertleTheTurtle" mentioned? Rest mode setting, cutting the power to USB ports after the certain period?
Sorry meant to clarify further on that (will edit original response)...

  • Rest mode is disabled (I started doing this initially because there were reports of rest mode bricking the system upon release)
  • Also had to disable HDMI/CEC control on the TV - as apparently the console will go into rest mode (even after disabling it) if you have HDMI-CEC enabled and simply turn off the TV.
Other notes:

  • Other than the HDD issue - the system runs (generally) great - I don't think this is a hardware issue - but an OS / system issue
  • No coil whine (practically silent) - has fan "C" in the console
 
I have had my 2TB WD P50 connected for almost a month now and no issues, I had the data corruption thing the first time I had it connected a week after launch. I also don’t use rest mode and have CEC on the console disabled.

I don’t play as much as others, so my console sees no use for days at times, so I run into less issues overall.

Oh wait I had one issue a few days ago, I couldn’t start some (not all!) games from the external drive. Dunno what was wrong there, the screen just stayed black after launching a game. Rebooting the console fixed that.
 

Justin9mm

Member
Hello fellow GAFers.

I created this thread as I couldn't find the specific discussion on the topic of PS5 users not wanting to connect their PS4 external HD, for the fear of causing the system instability.

I have had mine hooked up to my launch PS5 since day 1, through one of the rear USB ports, running without any perceived issues. Just recently got into the discussion with 6 other people (online friends) who are all refusing to connect their external HD's to PS5, as they seem to be convinced it will cause the system instability and potentially even brick their consoles. The source(s) of their information is(are) all over the internet. I did some checking and there seems to be a lot of chatter about this. I wanted to know what are the experiences of PS5 owners here on NGAF?

Regards
Just say to your friends:

Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?
 
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