Does Seagate External Hard Drive Work With PS5?

Seagate is one of the oldest and pioneer external hard drive manufacturers that are known to produce quality and high-performance devices for computer systems. In 2018 Sony decided to produce a special external hard drive for PlayStation 4 consoles and named it “Game Drive”. It was a matter of a few months until the Seagate PS4 Game Drive became all the rage in the market and one of the very few best-selling external hard drives for PS4.

But after the release of PS5 and its support for external hard drives, so many users who already own Seagate PS4 game drive were concerned whether their Seagate PS4 game drive would work on PS5 or not.

Just speaking in general, almost (not all) PS4 compatible external hard drives are also PS5 compatible. So, since the Seagate PS4 game drive is fully compatible, it’s supposed to work perfectly on your PS5 except in certain conditions that you’re going to learn from this article.

PS5 External Hard Drive Compatibility

Any external hard drive won’t work on PS5 unless it meets the following conditions:

• The support for USB 3.x connectivity. That’s it, if the external hard drive is configured with USB 2.0 or less, it won’t work on PS5. Seagate PS4 external HDD meets this condition as it’s a USB 3.0 external hard drive.
• Storage capacity must range from 250Gb to 8Tb. This condition excludes external hard drives that are larger than 8Tb or flash drives that are less than 250Gb. Again, Seagate PS4 external hard drive meets this condition with its 2Tb and 4Tb storage capacity.
• Wireless, dual-layer, and hub external hard drives are not accepted by PS5 and Seagate PS4 external HDD is just a wired, single-layer classical external hard drive specially formatted for use on PS4.

So, as you can see, Seagate PS4 Game Drive meets all the conditions to be compatible with PS5. If your external hard drive doesn’t meet one of these conditions, the PS5 system won’t support it (read more).

But, when will Seagate PS4 Game Drive NOT work on PS5?

Seagate PS4 External HDD Not Working On PS5, Why?

Many PS4 users tried to connect their Seagate external HDD to PS5 but the PS5 system won’t recognize it or the external HDD was simply rejected. Why does this happen although the Seagate PS4 Game drive does meet all the PS5 external HDD compatibility conditions? Well, here’s why:

• Your Seagate PS4 Game Drive might already be damaged/defective. Have you verified it’s working fine already? Try connecting it to your PS4 or even to a PC if possible to make sure it’s fully functional and doesn’t undergo any sort of effect. Make sure also that your external hard drive’s USB cable is fully functional and doesn’t have any issue.
• If you have connected your Seagate PS4 external hard drive to PS5 via the front USB port, it will NOT work. The PS5 system only accepts an external hard drive connected to one of the two USB 3.0 ports located on the rear side of the console.
• Connecting two external hard drives to the PS5 at the same time causes the PS5 system to reject the second drive and only the firstly-connected drive is accepted. Therefore, if you want to use multiple external hard drives on PS5, make sure that you don’t connect them all simultaneously.
• Connecting your Seagate PS4 external hard drive to PS5 through a USB hub is not allowed. You should connect your Ps4 external hard drive DIRECTLY to the PS5 USB port without any medium.
• You should have updated your PS5 system software to the latest version in order to enjoy using your PS4 external hard drive on it. You may not know that Sony has just recently supported the use of external hard drives on PS5 (specifically in April 2021). Therefore, if you are running an older version of the PS5 system software, intuitively your Seagate PS4 game drive won’t work on PS5.
• Using a special tool to connect your Seagate PS4 external HDD wirelessly to PS5 will prevent it from being recognized/approved.
• In some cases, using a long USB cable to connect your PS4 external hard drive to PS5 can cause problems.
• When successfully connected to PS5, don’t try to play unsupported PS5 games from your Seagate PS4 game drive, as they won’t work.

If you avoid all these actions and you connect your PS4 external hard drive properly to your PS5, it should virtually work fine.

You can read more on how to use PS4 external hard drive on PS5

In case you have any issue with your external hard drive on PS5, visit this guide to learn the basic PS5 external hard drive troubleshooting.

Conclusion

The Seagate PS4 external game drive DOES work on PS5 if it’s connected properly and doesn’t have any sort of performance issue. In fact, almost all external hard drives that work on PS4 will also work flawlessly on PS5.