Seagate Expansion Portable 2TB External Hard Drive HDD – USB 3.0 for PC Laptop (STEA2000400) , black

This works so well. My husband uses it for his Xbox.

I had read on a couple of forums that this HDD is one of the most economical ways to upgrade space on the PS4. I purchased 2 of them, one to use in the PS4 and one for the backup and to load movies on for the car trips so this will be a review as well as a little step by step for those of you looking to use this unit for the same thing.DISCLAIMER: I have never opened a computer on purpose and am not trained in any way on how to do what I did, but it was super easy following the steps laid out by Sony.In order to use this drive for the PS4 backup I used my laptop to format the drive to FAT32. The default format is ntsf and will not work for the PS4 backup. Plus there is some install files that are not needed for this use. I then used this drive to back up the nearly 500GB of apps and player data following Sony's guide for this which is here: [...] It took about 3 hours using this drive because of the write speed. A solid state drive would have been faster and probably twice as expensive.Then I formatted the other drive keeping the ntsf format but ridding the drive of the unnecessary files. Removing the drive from the case is fairly simple using the smallest screw driver I had in my set from about a half inch away from a corner sliding it along the seam towards the corner until one of the clips pop. The lid then comes off easily under fingernail power. NOTE: this will void the warranty so make sure you have formatted and tested the drive prior to breaking the case seal. Be careful not to crack the case, we are going to use it later.The drive is held in the case by 4 rubber screw covers that keep it snug. Turn it over and with a gentle tap it falls loose. Take the covers off the screws and remove the screws. There is a foil cover protecting the usb adapter which you should remove carefully and set aside with the screws and rubber covers (I'll explain why in a bit). The adapter comes of easily with a little wiggle.Installing the drive is super easy thanks to Sony having the foresight to know 500GB just wouldn't be enough memory. Follow these simple directions to install the drive: [...]Make sure to download the reboot update file to a thumb drive prior to restarting your PS4. You will also need your PS4 controller cable to use the controller until the initialization is completed.DO NOT SIGN INTO PLAYSTATION NETWORK UNTIL YOU RESTORE YOUR PS4 FROM THE BACKUP DRIVE.It takes as much time to restore as it did to backup so be ready to do something else for a bit depending on how much data you have... oh wait, I have an idea, lets use the old PS4 drive to make another 500GB external drive! Put the drive back together using the removed USB adapter, screws, rubber covers, and aluminum sticker shield.DO NOT START THE FORMAT PROCESS UNTIL YOUR PS4 IS INITIALIZED, RESTORED, SIGNED INTO PSN AND YOU HAVE CHECKED FOR ALL OF YOUR DATA, APPS AND GAMES. YOU MAY REGRET NOT LISTENING TO THIS ADVICE IF THE DRIVE IS CORRUPTED.Unfortunately you are not able to initialize the PS4 drive the same way you can the other HDD. You have to manually delete each partition and format from Computer Management. I found the step by step on this here :[...]The hardest part was finding where to go to find the drive because the author of this post missed a step on how to get there. What I did was went to CONTROL PANEL> SYSTEM AND SECURITY> ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS> COMPUTER MANAGEMENT and found the drive the same way you would on file explorer. The rest of the instructions are fairly straight forward.Now having used the PS4 for about a week I can tell you that it works great, has plenty of storage room, and is quiet during operation. I did a lot of research on solid state drives prior to picking this drive instead because for me the speed gained was not worth the extra money watching the side by side reviews like this one : [...]I feel like I made the best choice for my budget, experience, and needs. I have since also installed the second drive into the other PS4 we have and used the 500GB drive I made from the first PS4 upgrade for the backup.

Why did you pick this product vs others?:Western Digital has always worked very good vs Seagate for one!

I've had a 1 terabyte Seagate external hard drive -- one with a spinning disc inside and a motor -- for five years. My computer has a 1TB hard drive. I recently started getting error messages that the 1TB drive, which I use for backing up, was 90% full, and I decided it was time to add a large drive. So I was looking for a 2TB drive and almost bought one like the original. Then I saw this "Expansion" drive which only needs a USB cable and gets all the power it needs from the USB port on my computer. No need to plug a second power cable into a 120-volt wall outlet or surge protector. So I ordered it and discovered several really nice things about it. For one thing, it's way smaller than my previous external hard drive, about 1/2" thick and small enough to fit into the back pocket of a pair of blue jeans. In fact, it reminded me of a man's wallet as to size and shape. The special USB cable that comes with it is pretty short, though. I ended up attaching this little drive to the side of my PC's tower using some peel and stick Velcro, and that worked quite well, allowing me to place the drive so that the short USB cable works nicely. It really is plug and play, and once it's up and running, there's an executable file right on the drive to install special drivers -- it includes one for PC's and one for Macs, I note. Once the drivers were installed, I moved my backup files (created by Norton 360) to the new drive and designated the new drive on Norton 360 as the location for backups. Then I ran a full backup manually and that worked like a charm. The new 2TB drive is about 1/3 full with 2/3 unused space, so I'm going to use this one exclusively for Norton 360 backups. The original 1TB external hard drive has a few folders that I like to copy manually onto an external drive as a backup, one for my e-mail program, one for a "Work" folder with umpteen subfolders where I keep word processing documents and PDF's, a very, very large AV folder that has a lot of videos and pictures, and the "My Documents" folder with lots of subfolders from my C: drive. That has been great for the past five years -- if I accidentally delete something "permanently", I can immediately copy it from the backup folder on that external drive. Also, if I ever needed to reinstall Windows as my operating system, I could restore various applications by reinstalling them, but with a copy of videos, pictures, word processing documents and PDFs, I could easily restore those to my hard drive. So the old 1TB drive now is only about 1/3 full, too. So I'm in great shape, and I really love having this new drive in such a small size hanging on the side of my PC tower. It takes up so little space. I can't say how long this "Expansion" 2TB drive will last of course since I've had it just a few days, but so far, I'm very impressed and it's even better than I thought it would be. I note that it's sealed, so dust can't get in -- it has no vent holes on top the way a motorized external hard drive has to have to let heat out.