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During a recent move, I made the mistake of putting several gaming accessories together in one box, in a hurry, including a PlayStation 4, an Xbox One, and two identical external hard drives (Seagate STEA2000400) that have both been formatted to their respective systems. None of them have been powered on since the move. What is the best way to match them back up without losing data? I'm sure the formatting will make hooking them to a PC troublesome, but is there any information I can glean without formatting? If I hook the wrong one up, is there a better one to try it on? (Like, if put a PS4-formatted hard drive in an Xbox One, is it less likely to do anything irreversible? Or vice versa?) I tried Googling an answer, but I couldn't really find an answer to what to try that gave me more confidence than the 50:50 coin flip of just trying one and hoping it was the right one.

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    Surely plugging the drive in doesn't perform a format automatically... I am pretty certain you'd still have to manually start a format. If you plug one in, and it detects it and shows your the data, then you're good. If it doesn't then you know its the other USB drive.
    – Timmy Jim ♦
    Commented Jan 29 at 20:45
  • At least on PC the system always asks for a verification before formatting. While I can't say for SSDs, The USB Stick I use for save game transfer on my Xbox does read as "Something Xbox" when plugged into the PC.
    – Eric
    Commented Jan 30 at 10:56

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Like I mentioned in my comment, you should be able to simply test this by plugging them into the console and seeing if they show up as an external storage device and is readable. If the console isn't able to detect it/read it, then you know whatever one you plugged in currently is for the other console. The console should not perform any kind of formatting without your input.

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