In all my years of computer use I've only ever had one hard drive fail. I have hard drives today that are 15 years old and still work, the 1GB one being particularly useful in its immensity.
Said hard drive failed after a power cut occurred while I was enjoying some time with my Steam catalogue. The drive crashed as best I can tell, which rendered the drive unusable and the data unsalvageable.
Well, that same thing happened last night - except the "power cut" was caused by my one-year-old baby boy yanking the external hard drive from my PS4 while I played Day Of The Tentacle. I can't access the drive from my PS4 or my Mac so I'm calling it dead. At least all it had on it was games that are easy to recover and no personal info for nefarious sorts to find.
It was a blessing in disguise in any case, as I'd filled my 2TB internal and 1GB external drives with games, thanks to the console's requirement to install every game, and had to delete some games to make space.
I'm aware some people do this regularly, without a thought, however - I've been around long enough to understand the fleeting value of these machines and the games we enjoy on them. If that suits you, then fine, but my intention is to enjoy these games in 10, 20, 30 years time, and that means long after the servers are shut down, possibly long after Sony has gone away. Deleting the games from your drive also removes the patches that are regularly installed which means when you reinstall the game in some years time you will have only the original code from the disk. In short, I would like to keep 100% of my library installed at all times for posterity.
As such, I'd previously upgraded the 500GB drive that came with the machine to a 2TB version, and was using the original 500GB one in a USB caddy. Because this is how my brain works, I kept all my disc-based installs on the internal and all my PSN and PS-Plus installs on the external.
So, I went and bought a 4TB USB hard drive. Re-downloaded all my non-disc games overnight (took about 6 hours), then copied all my disc-based games from internal to external so they're all in one place (and so I wouldn't have to reinstall all of them and their updates). This took 4 hours.
Got hold of the 4.71 installation file and put it on a USB stick. Swapped the 2TB drive for the original one and booted up. My saves are automatically stored online thanks to a PS-Plus subscription I pay too much for, which saves a step.
While the firmware was installing I got to thinking - will I even be able to use the games on my external drive, or will it force me to reinstall everything (again)?
Well the answer is yes. It took a long time (we're talking about 111 games) during which I got to watch a "please wait" screen, but then the home screen came back with my games library intact. Great.
Now I'm downloading all my saves. It's also taking ages. Everything this console does takes ages. 10 minutes so far and it's about two thirds done.
6 hours to download my games, 4 hours to transfer the others to the external drive, 10 minutes to swap hard drives and install the firmware, 5 minutes to recognise the games 15 more to download my save games. And now I have ten disc-based games to reinstall.
And to think just the other day I remarked on Twitter that I could select "install", wait, hit start, and be watching the intro to Half-Life all in 40 seconds.
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