Will a HD duplicator clone my PS4 HD?

A

alanwaston

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I recentely purchased a used PS4 with a 1TB spinny drive. It's already set up with my info and some games. It's slow as molasses and I wanna put in a 1TB ssd. I have a disc duplicator caddy device that will clone any SATA drive to another SATA drive of equal or greater size. So, this should work yes? Or does Sony have some firmware etched into their drives?
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Probably not. The signature of the old HD will not match the new HD when the image is layed down.
 
alanwaston said:
I recentely purchased a used PS4 with a 1TB spinny drive. It's already set up with my info and some games. It's slow as molasses and I wanna put in a 1TB ssd. I have a disc duplicator caddy device that will clone any SATA drive to another SATA drive of equal or greater size. So, this should work yes? Or does Sony have some firmware etched into their drives?
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Why clone when the system has built in backup and restore functionality?
 
upgrading PS4 drive is pretty easy. A little more to it then a simple backup and restore but not much. Plenty of walk through videos on YouTube. I'd start there.
 
Doesn't the PS4 have a built in cloning feature for replacing the hdd? I swear that's what I used when I put an ssd in mine, maybe not though.
 
It has a backup and restore feature but it does not include the actual OS, you need to download that, save it to a flash drive and install it first, then perform the restore function and you'll be back up and running with your new drive.
 
RamonGTP said:
It has a backup and restore feature but it does not include the actual OS, you need to download that, save it to a flash drive and install it first, then perform the restore function and you'll be back up and running with your new drive.
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This is the correct answer. You can't clone the hard drive and expect it to work without issue. Every hard drive being use with a PS4 is very tightly encrypted. So you need to use the Backup and Restore feature on the PS4 itself. Unfortunately it's a time-consuming process. Also, I wouldn't advise a SSD unless you have money to throw away. You could get a much larger capacity drive (like the 2TB one I have in mine) at a higher RPM and get the same results. The marginal difference in boot times is not worth the increase in price and decrease in storage you get with the SSD. Just buy a larger hard drive that's not 5400rpm and you'll be fine.
 
RamonGTP said:
It has a backup and restore feature but it does not include the actual OS, you need to download that, save it to a flash drive and install it first, then perform the restore function and you'll be back up and running with your new drive.
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And I fail to see how doing that is not better and faster than trying to screw around with cloneing a hard drive that all sorts of DRM in place.
 
bigdogchris said:
And I fail to see how doing that is not better and faster than trying to screw around with cloneing a hard drive that all sorts of DRM in place.
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I wasn't implying that it's not better. Just providing some details on what steps are required. As far as I'm aware, this is the only way to get it done anyway.
 
bigdogchris said:
And I fail to see how doing that is not better and faster than trying to screw around with cloneing a hard drive that all sorts of DRM in place.
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I agree that cloning would be faster and the more preferred method. However, if the drive is encrypted, you can't move the data to a new drive without losing access, that's the whole point of encrypting a volume. If the encryption method is worth anything, the system is going to use some aspect of the drive that is unique to it as part of the calculation (I'm no encryption expert).
 
tesfaye said:
I agree that cloning would be faster and the more preferred method. However, if the drive is encrypted, you can't move the data to a new drive without losing access, that's the whole point of encrypting a volume. If the encryption method is worth anything, the system is going to use some aspect of the drive that is unique to it as part of the calculation (I'm no encryption expert).
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I do not think cloning is the preferred method, so I'm not sure if you are agreeing with someone else but it sounds like you are suggesting I believe cloning is the best option, which I do not.
 
bigdogchris said:
I do not think cloning is the preferred method, so I'm not sure if you are agreeing with someone else but it sounds like you are suggesting I believe cloning is the best option, which I do not.
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I think this got all mixed up, but it's far from important. I wasn't suggesting that you did, that much I'm sure of.
 
zamardii12 said:
This is the correct answer. You can't clone the hard drive and expect it to work without issue. Every hard drive being use with a PS4 is very tightly encrypted. So you need to use the Backup and Restore feature on the PS4 itself. Unfortunately it's a time-consuming process. Also, I wouldn't advise a SSD unless you have money to throw away. You could get a much larger capacity drive (like the 2TB one I have in mine) at a higher RPM and get the same results. The marginal difference in boot times is not worth the increase in price and decrease in storage you get with the SSD. Just buy a larger hard drive that's not 5400rpm and you'll be fine.
Click to expand...

I don't know. I have an SSD and it's made a remarkable improvement on load times for games. Sure, not nearly as fast as an SSD for the PC, but having a game load up in only 30 seconds instead of a couple minutes is nice. E.G. One of the complaints about FFXV was it's load times. With an SSD, I never really noticed any load times above 20 seconds.

As far as the HDD goes, other people have already mentioned it. Though, when I tried giving a friend my old PS4 for when I updated to the PS4 Pro, and put back the original HDD, I had to reinstall the OS onto it. I'm assuming there's more going on in the background than even is saved onto the hard disk.
 
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