PS4 Hard Drive Upgrade

True but the support can make a difference. For instance I would avoid OCZ like the plague but they have a very active forum user base which would lead you to think they make solid products.

Indeed. People can go a little far in the other direction though. Like when people were recommending intel 520's and also saying to not ever buy a sandforce drive. :confused: (man I wish I could dig up some quotes)

That said, maybe it is because I have a SSD's for years without failure.
3.5 years going strong with my sandforce-pioneering(pretty early at least) Gskill Phoenix Pro. :D
 
I'm buying this first :http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236551

Then when Sony adds support for external HDD's then I'll get a 3TB external drive and upgrade the internal to a 1TB SSD hybrid drive.

I don't wish to manage game installs hardly at all. I just want to install it and move on.

I don't think that drive is going to work... I believe they have stated the PS4 will allow up to 9.5mm drive, the one you linked is 15mm.
 
PS4 supports up to 12.5mm hard drives.

Even if that drive fits, I wouldn't use a green drive. It's going to be slower and wear out faster than the normal drives. The Green drives head parking is not a very good feature to have.
 
PS4 supports up to 12.5mm hard drives.

Even if that drive fits, I wouldn't use a green drive. It's going to be slower and wear out faster than the normal drives. The Green drives head parking is not a very good feature to have.

No the PS4 only supports 9.5mm thick HDs. From the faq:
PS4 is equipped with a 5400 RPM SATA II hard drive. Users can choose to install a new hard drive so long as it complies with these standards, is no thicker than 9.5mm, and is larger than 160GB.
 
Didn't even see it was on sale so I didn't even consider it. But at $102 I probably wouldn't have bought it anyway. I used that $32 savings yesterday towards an extra controller :).

Yeah, well I have only used 5400, 7200, and samsung SSD in my PC's. I'm not sure how good a Hybrid is for real, but I will try one in the home laptop soon. The stock one is a 500GB 5400rpm (its always running low on space), if the Seagate Hybrid improves this laptops performance which is AMD Llano noticeably I will throw one also inside my PS4 whenever I get one, because getting a 1TB SSD is to cost prohibitive at this point in the game. Now if you can spare the 32, why not return the other and move up? Well I would but it's your choice. :) Seems to me Hybrid SSD is smart (20-40 dollars more than a traditional HDD) It has the NAND flash, bigger space and similar space size that is competitive for the cost. I could be wrong but I doubt it. Just an idea.
 
I bet a HD upgrade will help more on the PS4 than it did on the PS3. Now that installs are required game devs won't bother tuning games to load in a reasonable amount of time off an optical drive. Optical drive have horrible access times, so they had to tune the games to read mostly sequentially. If they can assume a HD they won't have to do as much tuning, and they won't because it's extra work and time = money. The biggest difference between a slow hard drive, a fast hard drive, and an SSD is usually access time (though SSDs have a big advantage in transfer rate as well). The lack of tuning for optical loads will make access time relevant, so upgrading storage performance should help even if a higher transfer rate doesn't. The installation requirement also makes the PS4 a lot more like a PC from a storage perspective, and faster drives definitely help game loading on a PC.

No guarantees of course. Someone who's getting a PS4 on launch day please test. :p
 
No the PS4 only supports 9.5mm thick HDs. From the faq:
There's conflicting information online. The German site that tore one down a few weeks ago said it fits 12.5mm drives. Maybe 12.5mm is not officially supported? Maybe the FAQ meant the drive that comes with the system is 9.5mm? We'll know for sure in a few days.

LINK
 
I don't think that drive is going to work... I believe they have stated the PS4 will allow up to 9.5mm drive, the one you linked is 15mm.

Well then I'll be getting the hybrid 1tb Seagate. Dumb that it can not fit the slightly larger drive though.
 
I would stay away from anything with an SSD in it. Do the hybrid drives require trim support to operate at peak performance? I haven't found a definitive answer anywhere, but googling around looks like the ps4 does not support trim.

I would be leery of the 7200rpm drives as well because of heat.

You guys can be the ginny pigs though :). I'll wait a year and put in what has been found to work best.
 
I would stay away from anything with an SSD in it. Do the hybrid drives require trim support to operate at peak performance?
No. The OS does not see the NAND as a separate disk or have any knowledge that solid state storage is there. That's the whole point of these types of disk.

The cache is managed by the drive controller and is basically an 8GB buffer for reads/writes. The controller intelligently tracks and loads data you commonly access into the cache.

So for example, you're playing a MP game online and are using a specific set of maps over and over again. The controller will notice this and start caching that data into NAND. When this happens the loads will be significantly faster. Or lets say you're playing GT and are playing the same track over and over again to increase your lap time. After you load the track a couple times, the loads start drastically increasing, getting you back to the track faster.
 
Now if you can spare the 32, why not return the other and move up? Well I would but it's your choice. :) Seems to me Hybrid SSD is smart (20-40 dollars more than a traditional HDD) It has the NAND flash, bigger space and similar space size that is competitive for the cost. I could be wrong but I doubt it. Just an idea.
Actually the sale for the SSHD is over so it's a moot point now. I could have spared the money, but then there would be a slight chance of it not arriving before the PS4 so I just stuck with what I got ;). I'll wait for some people to give a comparison to see if it really is worth it. Either way my main concern was space not speed, I have 3 PS4 games here that's going to eat 103GB right from the start. :eek:
 
I have a crucial m4 512gb I'm going to throw in day one. I'm not too worried about TRIM. Intel, Crucial and Samsung all have their own form of garbage collection built into the controller. Intel's is the most aggressive and probably the best option. Samsung and Crucial SSDs do it in idle time.

If benches and use show it to be non-beneficial, I'll toss it back in my pc and sell my smallest SSD. With all the talk of game-caching on the hd, I would be shocked if a ssd wasn't beneficial. Here's to hoping...
 
Received my Samsung Spinpoint 1TB from Amazon today

1000
 
I went with the Crucial M500 960GB, showed up today.

The reviews say the PS4 is fast already so we will see what it will really do.

Absolutely hated the ps3 load times.
 
Last edited:
Wow , I would rather pay $119 for a hybrid SSD then $550-600 for a native SSD of the same storage size. I mean $500 for such small gains is pretty crazy , no offense.

Just curious but how do you guys justify spending almost 1.5 times the cost of the console for only double the space? Actually a little less after you format.

I mean the PS4 will support external storage in the future , you can count on it since Microsoft is doing it and all Sony has to do is enable it via a patch.
 
Wow , I would rather pay $119 for a hybrid SSD then $550-600 for a native SSD of the same storage size. I mean $500 for such small gains is pretty crazy , no offense.

Just curious but how do you guys justify spending almost 1.5 times the cost of the console for only double the space? Actually a little less after you format.

I mean the PS4 will support external storage in the future , you can count on it since Microsoft is doing it and all Sony has to do is enable it via a patch.

From what I've been told, the Hybrid SSDs are pretty useless without an application to tell it what needs to go into cache and what can stay on the disk.

I'd probably just throw a Black or equivalent in there. But I agree, it's not a $1k console, but then again, you could use the SSD in your DD
 
Wow , I would rather pay $119 for a hybrid SSD then $550-600 for a native SSD of the same storage size. I mean $500 for such small gains is pretty crazy , no offense.

Just curious but how do you guys justify spending almost 1.5 times the cost of the console for only double the space? Actually a little less after you format.

I mean the PS4 will support external storage in the future , you can count on it since Microsoft is doing it and all Sony has to do is enable it via a patch.

you don't have to justify it
this is [H]
 
Any power draw measurements yet? My fat PS3 is a pig and I don't want to go down that road again.
 
I can't seen to get my 1TB to work in my PS4. When installed screen just remains black with the light bar pulsing blue. If I put the stock drive back in it boots just fine. The drive works though as I tested it in my PC and formated it
 
I can't seen to get my 1TB to work in my PS4. When installed screen just remains black with the light bar pulsing blue. If I put the stock drive back in it boots just fine. The drive works though as I tested it in my PC and formated it

is it like the PS3 where the OS is partially stored on the hdd? if so, find out how to get it loaded.
 
Im not going to upgrade it until enough games I want come out. As of right now its just Killzone, BF4 is better on PC and COD is meh. I wanted Watch Dogs so badly, but they delayed that.
 
Im not going to upgrade it until enough games I want come out. As of right now its just Killzone, BF4 is better on PC and COD is meh. I wanted Watch Dogs so badly, but they delayed that.

Same, but I'll upgrade for speed, and not capacity. The major reason I upgraded my PS3 was it had a 60 GB, which limited it to only a few games, particularly at the end of the generation and if you did a digital download. As long as I can have at least 10 games, I'm sure I can always uninstall.
 
The idle draw seems quite high (idle here is in menu, doing nothing). Even the 'networked standby' at 10W seems a little high to me, given that it shouldn't have to power anything but the ARM core and some memory.

The gaming number needs to be revised up, I think I saw mention of ~150W in gaming (KZ). Ars has an article on it.
 
I can't seen to get my 1TB to work in my PS4. When installed screen just remains black with the light bar pulsing blue. If I put the stock drive back in it boots just fine. The drive works though as I tested it in my PC and formated it

I would think you would put the day one update on usb, boot with the flash drive and new hd installed. There is a video from gamespot on YouTube.
 
Durvelle, lets start from the beginning. Follow each step one at a time, not making any assumptions. Do each step again just as I list here.

  1. Replace the hard drive in PS4.
  2. Insert the USB key into your computer
  3. Right click the USB key and click Format
  4. Change the file system type to Fat32 and press Start
  5. Create a folder on the flash drive called PS4 (all caps)
  6. Go inside the PS4 folder and create a new folder called UPDATE (all caps)
  7. Download this file and place it inside the UPDATE folder
  8. Verify the PS4 is not powered on.
  9. Insert the USB key into the PS4.
  10. Press and hold the power button for 7 seconds.
  11. From the menu, select Initialize PS4 (Reinstall System Software)
 
The PS4 HDD caddy appears to be 12.5mm tall. That would explain the reason some places are saying 12.5mm drives. Anyone see a reason why a 12.5mm drive wouldn't fit?
 
Hmm , nice performance differences but not worth a $550 1TB SSD in my mind. However the SSHD seems like the best mix of cost/performance.
 
Back
Top