Developer m0rph3us1987, who released the "Holy Grail" PS4Hen for PS4 4.55, has stated earlier today on Twitter that he will not update the HEN to support loading "backups" from External Drives.

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External Hard Drive support is one of the main points that people have been touting as a reason to upgrade from firmware 4.05 to firmware 4.55 (which was recently publicly hacked).

Lots of people on the scene are staying on firmware 4.05 for hacking purposes, until the dust settles on firmware 4.55. Support for external HDD loading of backups would probably have been the tipping point for most people. However now with pretty much all functionality from 4.05 ported to 4.55 and even without this specific feature, it sounds like upgrading to 4.05 is becoming a no brainer.

When it comes to external HDD loading, there's an obvious expectation from the warez scene that this would allow people to install even more games on their hacked PS4. For homebrew enthusiasts, however, external hard drive support doesn't bring that much benefits: it's not like there's many homebrews on the PS4 that require gigabytes and gigabytes of data. It's not like there's many homebrew applications on the PS4 to start with, due to the lack of a full fledged open source SDK.

The Holy Grail payload is not open source, which makes it difficult to add features to it. Difficult, but not impossible: in the past, piracy has always found a way. If some people decide they want to support external hard drives to load more pirated games, I'm pretty sure it will happen ultimately.