I now have a 2 Terabyte Uncharted 4 PS4. It was dead simple to do. The backup took about 3 hours for close to 400 Gigabytes and the restore took about the same.
It seems that most instructions lie and tell you you can't back up and restore your already installed games but you can.
Some morons will even tell you it voids your warranty but it doesn't. Sony provides instructions on their own site.
High level steps.
1. Use the PS4's own backup/restore function to back up everything to a USB device. I have a USB 1 TB drive so I used that.
2. Download the full OS/Update from Sony's site using their own instructions. It's about 838 MB so not really that big.
Turn off your PS4 and unplug everything
3. Replace the old drive with the new drive following Sony's own instructions. Takes about 10 minutes unless you are screwdriver challenged.
4. Attach your controller to one port with a USB cable and attach your USB storage device to the other
5. Plug everything back in again. turn on the telly and hold down the power until the second beep (about 7 seconds)
6. From the menu choose the option to install the OS and update patch. Can't remember what it's called but it's in the Sony instructions. Should not take more than 10 minutes
7. Restart normally and go through the basic setup. Don't worry too much because your restore is going to overwrite shit anyway.
8. Go to backup/restore under setting and start the restore.
9. Unless you really fucked up badly the restore will start and once it has finished it will reboot looking exactly the way you started out but with waaaaay more space.
Easy peasy
how's it running otherwise man? better?
It seems ok for the moment but the refusal to start happens about once a week and my son wouldn't tell me if it happened. He just unplugs the power, counts to 10 and plugs it in again.
I did buy the Sony 3 year warranty on it so if it does die I'm covered.
I really need to do this for my PS3. I've been out of HDD space for years...
Not that big a deal as far as mechanics go. Backup and restore take the most time if you want all your games back.
Well, as fate would have it, the thing just bit the dust. God damn that's what I call shitty luck.
Was it a launch model?
It was an 80GB MGS4 model. So pretty old. Apparently what happened to it is pretty common, and I guess I should be thankful that it actually lasted this long. Oh well, bummer...
Had my launch model repaired once for $100 but it only lasted 6 months.
I thought about doing the hard drive swap on both the PS3 and PS4, but never got around to it. I also thought about that other option where there's another company that created a housing for a full size hard drive that sits on top of the PS4 and connects into the laptop hard drive section. I thought it would be awesome to have 4TB of space but then realized do I really need that much space?
Thanks for the step by step instructions. At some point I might want to try this and I will come searching for this post.