SSDs and the PS4

 Upgrading the drive, is it worth it?

TLDR: Yes. Both the scenarios with the PS4 Pro or regular. But the reasons are not quite the same.

These drives have gotten cheaper and better. With onboard cache and smart controllers the lifespan, the sheer size and performance of the SSD drives have gotten better. I just got this drive for 130$ on Amazon. 

Benefits

I'm sure only a week or so later you will be able to find a cheaper option, but the point is mostly that this is an affordable one. Though storage maker are the only ones insisting that a megabyte is a rounded 1000 bits, instead of 1024, like let's say RAM memory, hence cutting corners on actual space, that's still nearly a terabyte of storage.

Capacity

And that's where all this rant might start making sense. On the "original" or regular PS4, the base storage was 512 GB. Though this is nothing to sneeze at, it represents about 10 Bluray drives of data. So, reasonably, about 10 full size games. That's not a whole lot. 

Doubling the capacity was certainly a nice added value. In the PS4 pro though, the 1TB option is included so not so much so, for that option.

Speed

After a bit of research I found out that the theoretical limit in speed for accessing a hard drive, in both platforms is different. In the case of the regular PS4, it turns out that you can get about 300mb/sec and in the Pro version that goes up to 600mb/s.

This particular drive is rated at about 550MB/sec. So the performance boost is subjectively not as significant on the original PS4. I say, subjectively, because a high performance regular HDD with a good amount of cache could probably shave off a lot of the wait time loading levels in games as well. After all the included drive was a 5400rpm HDD. Not nearly the fastest available.

On the PS4 pro (and for this I had to look on the internet for homemade videos) the gain is much more noticeable. As the bandwidth issue becomes much more significant. (And a whole lot more of a big deal between the consoles, in fact)

Conclusion

So in the original PS4 the gain is noticeable. From the inexpensive but reliable HGST included HDD to the Crucial SSD, the difference is clear. Added with the fact that it will probably double your capacity it's well worth the effort. The process itself was surprisingly easy though possibly re-downloading all of your media/games to your drive, a bit of a pain.

For the PS4 pro I guesstimate that the performance gain would be probably even more noticeable, but cannot verify it for myself.

I think it was worth it. I'd love to hear bout your own experiences with the PRO if you have one. Or maybe even a second Gen console (slim etc...)

Leave your comments below!