How to Wipe a PS4 External Hard Drive on Windows PC?

About PS4

PS4 (Play Station 4), Sony's eighth-generation gaming platform, was launched on November 15, 2013. Upon its release, the PlayStation 4 became the most powerful platform in the world, with four times the speed and precision of the PlayStation 3, and polished the industry with more features than ever before. Usually, it has an initial storage capacity of 500GB.

In 2015, the one-terabyte version was introduced which some believed was still insufficient because users had to remove old games to save new ones. Furthermore, Sony released a software update that allowed customers to save their games on an external hard drive (must be USB 3.0) and save up to 8 TB of additional data.

How to wipe a PS4 external hard drive on Windows 10?

With the flexible compatibility of the external hard drive, PS4 allows users to store more games to enjoy. In 2019, Sony announced PS5 as the successor to the PS4. For a better gaming experience, some users might choose to clean a PS4 external hard drive for selling or having other plans. However, if you plan to sell it or give it to other people, only formatting a PS4 external hard drive is not enough to protect your personal data information.

Thus, we suggest you try professional third-party software which will be more dependable in swiftly and safely wiping everything on your PS4 external hard disk to better protect your data.

As a powerful disk and partition manager, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional always works hard in helping users solve problems. The “Wipe Hard Drive” function is for you to conveniently and thoroughly clean data on your internal disk and external devices. What's more, you can use this tool to clone your disks including PS4 or PS5 disks, convert a disk to GPT or MBR without data loss, and so on.

▶ Note: Please plug your PS4 external hard drive into your PC.

Step 1. Install and run Partition Assistant. Right-click your PS4 disk and select “Wipe Hard Drive”.

Step 2. In the popup window, you can choose a suitable way to wipe your hard drive, and click “OK”. Here, we choose “Full sector with random data (Safe, Quick)” as an example, it can write random data to every sector on a hard drive to avoid retrieving data for recovery software.

Step 3. Then you click “Apply” on the top left corner of the main page to execute the wipe.

Then your PS4 external hard drive is wiped. The space will show as unallocated space. You can use it as an extended storage device for your Windows PC after formatting or give it to another user.

Further reading: How to use external hard drive on PS4/PS5?

After the wiping external hard drive, if you wish to keep it as a new external hard drive for PS5, you’ll need to perform twice disk formatting. One is on your PC, and the second is on your game console. Here are detailed steps.

Section 1. Format a wiped PS4 hard drive on PC

PS4 will need an exFAT file system, so first, you’ll need to format your hard drive as an exFAT drive. AOMEI Partition Assistant can do this for you. The “Format Partition” feature supports FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, Ext2, Ext3, and Ext4.

Step 1. Connect the external hard drive to your computer and run AOMEI Partition Assistant. In the main interface, right-click the partition on the external hard drive, and choose “Format Partition”.

Step 2. Among listed file systems, choose a suitable file system and click “OK”.

Then click “Apply” in the left-up corner to confirm the operation.

Section 2. Reformat external hard drive

Step 1. Turn on your PS4, plug the hard drive in, and go to Settings > Devices > USB Storage Devices.

Step 2. Select the USB storage device to format and choose “Format as Extended Storage”.

Then, you can use this external hard drive on your Play Station.

Ending

If you don’t know how to wipe a PS4 external hard drive, this post shows you a safer option than formatting in Disk Management. AOMEI Partition Assistant is a versatile tool, if the external disk is an SSD, you can choose the “Secure Erase SSD” feature to erase your SSD without hurting its lifetime.