The PS4 affords owners with the opportunity to upgrade the system's built-in hard drive for larger, faster variants. Sony mandates that the drive is no taller than 9.5mm and has a capacity of at least 160GB, but within those confines, you're free to use any consumer-grade internal drive.

However, before you go dropping considerable amounts of cash on an expensive SSD drive, you may want to weigh the cost as compared to the speed benefits. To help advise you on your PS4 storage quest, we ran some tests on the stock drive, an SSHD, and a SSD.

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System Boot Time



Stock HDD Hybrid SSHD SSD 0:22.20 0:19.96 0:16.96

Game Install, Boot, and Level Load Time





Battlefield 4 (Disc) CoD: Ghosts (Disc) Stock HDD Install Time 1:03.39 0:51.93 Boot Time 0:10.30 0:14.74 Level Load 0:31.48 0:53.68 Hybrid SSHD Install Time 1:13.12 1:09.60 Boot Time 0:10.88 0:17.40 Level Load 0:33.58 0:31.67 SSD



Install Time 1:02.77 0:54.42 Boot Time 0:10.50 0:11.66 Level Load 0:31.33 0:40.30



NFS: Rivals (Disc) AC4: Black Flag (Disc) Stock HDD Install Time 0:29.60 0:36.85 Boot Time 0:19.06 0:10.03 Level Load 0:22.66 1:00.93 Hybrid SSHD Install Time 0:40.72 0:34.02 Boot Time 0:20.70 0:47.55 Level Load 0:15.88 0:29.27 SSD



Install Time 0:26.33 0:35.15 Boot Time 0:19.38 0:57.27 Level Load 0:19.01 0:25.31



Resogun (Digital) Stock HDD Install Time N/A Boot Time 0:11.55 Level Load 0:07.06 Hybrid SSHD Install Time N/A Boot Time 0:11.66 Level Load 0:07.15 SSD

Install Time N/A Boot Time 0:09.75 Level Load 0:06.90

Which Should You Buy?



The results indicate that a hybrid SSHD drive can deliver many of the benefits of a traditional SSD but at a considerably lower cost. Although the SSD offered the best speeds in most cases, the SSHD only fell a few seconds shy of its scores, but both offer notably speed increases over the stock drive.

It's important to note that when it comes to disc-based game installs and boot-up times, all of the storage solutions are bottlenecked by the speed of the disc drive, whereas level loads and overall system boot-up time see significant gains from a SSD or SSHD. Games purchased through the PSN and stored entirely on local storage, like Resogun, see performance gains across the board.

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In short, a SSHD hybrid drive provides the speed improvements of a traditional SSD, but greater affordability and total storage capacity.

About Our Tests



For our testing we utilized the standard HDD that comes installed on the PS4, which offers 500GB of storage and a disc speed of 5,400 RPM, as well as a Samsung 840 EVO-Series 250GB SSD (See it On Amazon) and a Seagate 1TB SSD/HD ST1000LM014 (See it on Amazon). Specs and cost can be found below:



Stock PS4 Drive Samsung SSD Seagate SSHD Size 2.5" 2.5" 2.5" Height N/A 7mm 9.5mm Storage 500GB 250GB 1TB Interface SATA II 3Gbps SATA III 6Gbps SATA III 6Gbps Price N/A $174.99 $106.53