Time to get a 4TB portable hard drive? Developers SiSTRO and Xvortex have released PS4 PKG2USB, a tool for the PS4 that allows owners of a hacked console to run their games from and external hard drive. The tool is compatible with both 4.05 and 4.55 consoles.

In its current state, the process to get games properly installed to an external USB drive with this tool seems pretty convoluted and error prone, but it might be useful for people who are running out of space on their internal drive. The basic idea is that you have to install the game on the internal hard drive first, then move some files from the internal disc to the external disc, update some config file at the root of the usb drive, and run pkg2usb’s payload.

At a quick glance, it seems this only supports one game at a given time, and running another game might require to change the config file again.

Additionally, some people have complained that in practice the game still needs to be on the internal hard drive, which makes the feature useless. This is a misunderstanding, probably due to the fact that the plugin does not automatically delete the original pkg file from the internal drive. Even though it’s a misunderstanding, this shows the plugin is not the easiest thing to use yet.

This is great progress, and also awesome to see that this feature is also available for 4.05, but unless you are really constrained with space, I’d suggest to wait a bit, and hope that future versions of the tool will be more user friendly.

From the Readme:

This is a PS4 payload (based on Vortex’s dumper) to dump and run fake PKGs on USB. USB drive must be formatted to exFAT

works only with fpkg (not official pkg)

game/app have to be before installed as usually on internal storage

copy ps4-pkg2usb.cfg to usb root

edit config title_id with game/app title_id

always use the same USB port that when you installed game

to reinstall game to internal hdd, remove and reinstall as usual tip: if you still have the pkg and you want to avoid wasting time waiting for the file to be copied from the payload on the USB HDD, copy the pkg to X:\PS4\CUSAxxxxx\app.pkg

Download PS4 PKG2USB

You can download PKG2USB from CelesteBlue’s github here.

Source: via @CelesteBlue