As enthusiasts, we have to like that Sony shies away from proprietary storage technologies in its gaming consoles. Instead, the company sticks with standard hard drives, making upgrades quick and easy. Back in the day, its PS2 accommodated 3.5-inch PATA devices, which sound downright ancient now. The PS3 was compatible with 2.5-inch SATA-based storage. Today, the PlayStation 4 includes an easy-to-replace 2.5" disk as well, keeping the tradition going.
From the factory, you get a 500 GB (465 GB formatted) drive that allocates about 57 GB for the operating system and other software. Now that digital downloads and local installations are necessary, though, we anticipate the remaining 408 GB will start disappearing quickly once more content becomes available. Does that make you want to drop in something bigger, even if you're still stuck with a mechanical disk?
On the other hand, an SSD would be cool to try too. You don't necessarily have to take a big capacity hit, either. A 500 GB Samsung 840 EVO runs $325 or so, and if it made a big experiential difference, surely there would be plenty of enthusiasts swapping solid-state repositories into their consoles, just to try them out.
Alright, fair enough. Few of us want to double the console's price by throwing in a massive SSD. So realistically, you're looking at a choice between speed or space. We're going to compare those two extremes using a handful of 2.5" drives, hopefully determining the right balance for you.
Swapping Your PlayStation's Drive
As with any hard drive swap, adding an empty disk into a platform means reinstalling your operating system. Before you begin that process, though, you may want to back up your saved games or make sure they're synced to PSN Plus. Your favorite titles naturally need to be reinstalled as well, and you can do that from discs or PSN. Sony doesn’t limit the number of times you can grab a game from its network, fortunately.
Make sure you have a USB-based flash drive, to which you'll copy the operating system install file. Sony provides this for download; simply grab it and make sure it's in the directory PS4/Update/. Also, take note of the operating system version you're running, since Sony won't let you revert to a previous build.
The console maker posts two software update packages, including a full install that weighs in around 880 MB and a smaller update in the 315 MB range. You want the bigger file for a complete installation.
The physical drive swap is easy. All you need is a small Phillips screwdriver. Sony hides the PlayStation's hard drive under the glossy black accent cover, which slides off with minimal effort. Once you remove it, there's one screw that secures the drive cage. Kudos to Sony for adding the square, circle, triangle, and rectangle controller pattern on the screw.
Four screws lock the factory 2.5-inch drive into place, and they're decoupled from the chassis with rubber grommets. A height limit of 9.5 mm prevents the installation of larger 2 TB repositories. However, there are plenty of large mechanical disks and super-fast SSDs 9.5 mm-tall or less.
With the drive installed, plug in the flash drive and power the platform on. Either hold the power button for seven seconds to access the fail-safe menu, or the the system will automatically boot into safe mode, guiding you to install the operating system from your external storage device.
We picked out a handful of different devices to test in the PlayStation 4's one drive bay, including Kingston's E50 240 GB SSD, Seagate's SSHD, and a WD Black2 dual-drive. An older WD Scorpio Blue 1 TB from 2011 even made it into our little round-up, if only as a comparison point.
The Kingston SSD lets you switch over to solid-state storage without giving up any capacity compared to Sony's stock hard drive. It adds more than $300 to your already-sizable technology investment, though.
Seagate's SSHD seemed like an interesting compromise, sporting 1 TB of mechanical storage and 8 GB of MLC flash, yet priced right around $100. We didn't know how well its caching algorithms would work with Sony's operating environment though, so we knew we'd have to test it a little differently in order to measure its efficacy.
The Western Digital Black2 is a hybrid technology of sorts, though it differs from Seagate's offering in that its solid-state and conventional storage are uniquely accessible. So, you get 120 GB of flash and 1 TB of disk space in a single device. The ideas is that you choose where you want to put your operating system (SSD), applications (SSD), and user data (hard drive). Unfortunately, the PlayStation never let us get that far, giving us an error that the OS needed a drive with at least 160 GB. As a result of how Western Digital sets this drive up, it simply won't work with the PS4.
Lastly, we have a 1 TB Western Digital Scorpio Blue. We're not expecting much out of it, but I had it lying around, it doubles the PlayStation's stock capacity, and can be found under $100. At the very least, I wanted to know if a larger, non-stock disk helped improve performance or hurt it.
How We Tested
I started with a fresh installation for each set of benchmarks. Rather than messing with a stopwatch to time each run, I set up a video camera to record the process. The video was sent through an editor to trim the beginning and ending; everything between was the benchmark's duration. Each test was run three times and averaged, yielding a final result.
The days of firing up your console and jumping straight into a game are gone. Now, you have to power up, boot to the operating system, and then start navigating around (sounds a lot like your computer, right?). Fortunately, that makes boot time a great point of comparison for wildly disparate storage devices.

Sony equips the PS4 with a fairly slow stock hard drive. Boot times improve by 23% with Kingston's SSD installed, 15% with Seagate's SSHD plugged in, and even 9% when we upgrade to a 1 TB Western Digital Scorpio Blue we had lying around.
Despite the percentages, though, we're only looking at a five-second boost, tops, which isn't a huge number.

Next, we go for a couple of game installs, which is a mandatory process for any disc-based title.
In most cases, storage technology makes absolutely no difference, since you're constrained by the read performance of the Blu-ray drive. If you're hoping start playing sooner with a hard drive upgrade, you'll be disappointed.

Loading a game from the PlayStation 4's UI to the title screen is mildly faster with Kingston's E50 SSD installed, compared to the stock Spinpoint M8 500 GB. The same goes for Seagate's SSHD. But in absolute terms, the experience is imperceptibly similar.
The Western Digital drive, in fact, ends up being a bit slower, though again, not by an amount you'd notice. It's really only worth upgrading for more capacity, in this case.
Despite those tiny performance differences, you're still stuck watching several splash screens before you can get into the game. Let us skip over all of that, Sony, and we'll be happy.

The biggest gains comes from loading an existing game save, which might be what you end up doing most often anyway.
For this test, I used a save point in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag with a few hours of gameplay ahead of it (in Tulum, in case you're interested). Kingston's E50 SSD and Seagate's SSHD perform identically, improving performance compared to the stock Samsung Spinpoint M8 by 33%. I'm not certain that's worth losing capacity in the case of the SSD, but Seagate gives you the bump up in speed and capacity.
Unfortunately, our two-year-old Scorpio Blue turns out to be slower. It turns out that not every upgrade is good for more performance.

Over time, Seagate's solid-state hybrid drive design is supposed to cache hot data (the stuff accessed most frequently) in its 8 GB of MLC flash. In order to better gauge whether the previous chart's performance was truly representative of the SSHD incorporating our save game data into cache, we ran an extended test of this technology.
Loading the same game file 10 times, restarting the PlayStation 4 after each run, we see performance varying significantly. Even the worst run is faster than Sony's stock mechanical drive. However, I wouldn't say it's clear that SSD-like behavior is to thank.

To ensure that Sony's Blu-ray disc check process wasn't adding variance to a benchmark that should have only gotten faster, we purchased a digital copy of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag on the Playstation Network and ran the test 10 more times. The results proved fairly similar.
The first three runs demonstrated quite a bit of difference, favoring the disc-based installation. But the repetitions after turned out to be quite even.
Hardware enthusiasts struggle to leave their systems alone, and I'm no different. It's hard for me to buy anything (even a console, which you wouldn't think would be ideal for tweaking), and not want to improve on its stock form. Fortunately, Sony really does make it easy to pull out the PlayStation 4's hard drive and swap in the storage device of your choosing.
Our testing shows that there are some performance gains to be had from tossing an SSD into the PS4, but they're small. You can shave a few seconds off of its boot time or load a saved game slightly faster, but ultimately, you're going to spend way too much more or lose too much capacity in the process. Sure, solid-state drives are getting cheaper. To match the PS4's stock 500 GB disk, though, you're looking at several hundred dollars. That's enough to build an entry-level gaming PC!
We can actually make a case for Seagate's 1 TB SSHD, though. At $120, the drive is affordable. It also delivers somewhat SSD-like performance, even as it doubles the console's stock capacity. In many cases, the speed-up you get will be difficult to feel. But at least you can fit a lot more content onto the SSHD without sinking a ton of cash in an upgrade.
As for the 1 TB WD Scorpio Blue we had lying around, it turns out to be a little slower than Samsung's stock Spinpoint M8. The good news is that you give up minimal speed for twice the capacity. And if you have a spare notebook drive taking up space somewhere anyway, the upgrade turns into a fun little no-cost project.
In the grand scheme of things, you don't get enough out of a PlayStation 4 hard drive upgrade to justify spending a lot of money. The PS4 was designed with its stock disk in mind, and it delivers a well-balanced experience, given the console's total cost. You wouldn't buy a new car and then drop half of its cost on an exhaust system for 10 more horsepower, right? That'd be the SSD equivalent. Those same gains you get on the desktop just don't translate over.
Again, we like the Seagate 1 TB SSHD for its speed, size, and selling price. If you do feel compelled to upgrade immediately, that's the drive to buy. But even then, there aren't enough games to fill the included 500 GB disk. Storage is only getting cheaper, and we'll eventually see 2 TB devices in a 9.5 mm form factor. Perhaps by then you'll need the extra space.
Here's another idea for gamers with money burning a hole in their pockets. Pick up a PSN Plus subscription, play online, and gets discounts on new titles. Or just buy a couple of PS4 games and enjoy some quality time with the console. Still feeling too flush with cash? The PS Vita might make a more compelling purchase for its Remote Play capability. That's a story for another day...



