PS4 Harddrive upgrade query ?

Associate
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Well im about to upgrade my PS4 and am going the sata extension/molex route in order to use a 4tb 3.5" drive as that gets me a far better performance/price per gb ratio now ive seen many vids on you-tube comparing load times of ssd vs sshds vs bog standard 2.5" drives and the difference is quite noticeable overall normally around 15%-25% for a SSHD for instance as to many games now on the PS4 have ridiculously long loading times so my question is what do you think would have overall best performance a WD Black 4tb a Toshiba X300 4TB 128MB 7200RPM or a Seagate 4tb SSHD ?
 
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Soldato
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Why not just get a 2TB 2.5" drive. Performance is fine and its a much neater install. The Samsung M9T is a 5400rpm drive but due to the platter size it gives comparable performance to a 7200rpm drive.

I would not bother with SSHD or SSD drives for PS4 tbh.
 
Don
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Why not just get a 2TB 2.5" drive. Performance is fine and its a much neater install. The Samsung M9T is a 5400rpm drive but due to the platter size it gives comparable performance to a 7200rpm drive.

I would not bother with SSHD or SSD drives for PS4 tbh.

+1 for this - Samsung 2TB is the way to go - 2TB is plenty, SSD or SSHD don't actually make a huge difference as the PS4 is not designed around them.

From a multiplayer point of view, the Samsung 2TB is plenty fast enough, I am regularly one of the first people to load into games on map changes etc.
 
Caporegime
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I have a Solid State Drive in my PlayStation 4 :), I barely noticed / notice any improvement in load times.

I only play a 'few' games at a time, have very few actually saved to the drive.
 
Soldato
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Have heard a few horror stories on the SSD front, convinced me to return my (unopened) 500GB SSD from Amazon and opt for the new PS4 1TB 'C' shape instead.

I'd just opt for a standard 1 or 2TB HDD.
 
Associate
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If there was a 2gb sshd then then it would be a no brainer. To give you an idea gtaV will fully load when it says 80% loaded with the 1 tb sshd. Its not day and night but is a bit faster for sure. It's totally compatible with the Ps4. Some of the 2tb drives can randomly beep which you may want to look into. SSD's don't really work with the ps4 and progressively slow down.
 
Associate
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It's worth saying the sshd is only faster the third time you load something due to how it caches the hard drive on the nand memory.
 
Soldato
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I have a 1TB SSHD in mine. Can't really say whether it's much quicker than the HDD because I have nothing to compare it to, but it performs well and 1TB is a good amount of storage to have. I'm never going to need that many games installed at any one time anyway.
 
Associate
OP
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Well there's enough vids on You-tube Digital Foundry have done many now and the speed differences are quite noticeable 15-25% on average for an SSHD SSD even faster but i cant find a higher spec/speed mechanical drive to compare against as the standard 2.5" drives are slow as hell and much more expensive per GB than me buying a full size/speed 4tb and Sata/Molexing it up a 2tb aint going to cut it for the lifespan of the PS4 for me.
 
Soldato
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Unless timing you will not notice a few extra seconds here and there. The problem with an SSHD is unless you play the same game all the time it's going to be constantly swapping data form the cache. If what you are playing is not cached it's a very slow 5400rpm drive.
Using a 1TB 7200rm will give better consistent results but personally having used all the drives I would go with size over speed on a console and just use the Samsung M9T 2TB drive.
 
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Associate
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A 20% increase in all loading times before/during gameplay is Huge and i know many now who's 2tb drives are starting to get full when you consider around a 10yr lifespan of the PS4 and PS+ PSN and installed mandatory based games and massive GB endless updates/patches id say 3.5tb usable isn't that big to be fair, to me it doesn't make sense buying a slow crappy drive and paying more per GB for the pleasure, i done this when the PS3 came out and the biggest 2.5" drive on the market was 250gb i sata/molex in a 3.5" Samsung F1 1tb and immediately noticed a much quicker system and game loading and payed about the same price as the then current 2.5" 250gb drives.
 
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Soldato
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Don't forget the PS4 is designed to stream from the slow drive to RAM this is why all games need to be installed. It buffers a certain amount of data to system Ram on the fly (Up to 6GB) so drive performance of the main storage drive is not a big impact as other systems even PS3 which had very little ram for on the fly storage. As long as the drive is quick enough to keep the buffer full very little gains will be had with a faster drive. Initial load times and system boot times may be slightly quicker but not massively. When I had my 1TB SSD in mine it was a bit quicker but nothing amazing. You are also limited by the slow Sata speed which struggles to reach Sata 2 speeds at times.

If you have filled a 2TB drive you need to delete some old crap out you are not using. I have a 2TB drive and just about every game that has come out bar football games and I'm still doing ok for space.

Not saying your idea is not a good one but tbh it all sounds a bit gash to me. I prefer things a bit neater and self contained.
 
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Soldato
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You may find that rest mode no longer works properly if you use an externally powered hard drive, as the PS4 won't be able to control it's power state properly.
 
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