Can I connect an external hard drive to two different devices?

Question

I am planning on buying an 8 TB external HDD for my PS4 but I would like to save 1TB for my Smart TV, I was wondering if this was possible.

Answer 1

You can share an external hard disk physically when you unplug and replug it in to another device.

You can also share your disks over a network if your devices support that. I'm guessing neither the PS4 nor the Smart TV can do that by themselves, so you'd need another device to serve up the HDD (unless the disk enclosure itself has networking capability). This is probably the option you want.

If you meant physically plugging in both drives into two different devices, I don't think that's safe/possible via USB. Normally, one would use something like SAS to share the same disks between multiple devices, but I don't think you'd have simultaneous access; SAS would normally be used for things like failover/high availability, not simultaneous access. If you try to do that with software that is not aware of concurrent access, Very Bad Things will result sooner or later.

If you need to reserve space, then what you want is quotas or multiple partitions. So you'd create a 7TB partition for one device and a 1TB partition for another (assuming the devices support partitions).