Lucky for us, a German site got their hands on a PS4 debug already, and they’ve been scrutinizing everything possible over the last few days. One thing that they conveyed information for is that of the possibilities for replacing the included hard drive with a larger capacity model. Luckily, it looks like Sony knows that this is something that gamers want to do, and they’ve once again made it fairly easy to perform the upgrade. They haven’t shown any of the setup process in the OS yet, but they have removed the drive to identify it, and measured the drive tray to determine which hardware would fit.

Installed in every PS4 is a (Western Digital) 2.5-inch drive (laptop standard) with a capacity of 500GB, and spinning at 5,400 rpm. Unlike the PS3 though, which limited drives to a maximum of 9.5mm in height, the PS4’s hard drive tray will allow drives with a maximum height of 12.5mm.

Now, this is good news overall, but right now, the hard drive market is in a pretty weird flux. I personally own a Western Digital 1TB drive that is 12.5mm in height, but it’s not even available any more. What’s worse though, is that right now, there aren’t many drives available that exceed 1TB that meet the height requirements. I did find a couple though, and the prices actually aren’t too bad.

After some pretty painstaking research, the drives listed below are probably your best bet. I’m sure that others are available, and as long as they meet certain criteria, you should be safe. The criteria that needs to be met are:

*Height – 12.5mm or lower

*Drive Size – 2.5-inch laptop drive

*Interface – SATA 3.0Gb/s or faster (if you find a drive with a faster interface, it will not increase performance)

*Drive Speed – 5,400 RPM or faster

Here’s a list of drives that will definitely work. You’ll see that I’ve included a “Hybrid” drive, which uses a small amount of solid state storage to speed certain operations up (at least on laptops). Unfortunately, we don’t know for sure if the PS4 will utilize a hybrid dive effectively, since at least on laptops, the Operating System actually has controls to effectively use this technology. So, get the hybrid “at your own risk” with no proof or guarantees that performance will improve on the PS4.

Drives:

Amazon – Western Digital 1TB

Newegg – 1TB Western Digital

Amazon – 1TB Seagate Hybrid – This is the one that I am getting for my PS4.

Check out this video from Tested showing a comparison of drive technologies. They did a great job and ran some thorough tests.

Amazon – 1.5TB Travelstar (Western Digital)

Amazon – Toshiba 1.5TB

If you happen to get one of the drives from Amazon, would you kindly just add it to your Wish List, hit the link below, and finalize your order? That helps us pay our bills 🙂

Amazon Link

*NOTE* Try to steer-clear of the “Green” series of Western Digital drives. Historically, these drives are really built more as raw storage and usually have a lesser performance

Also, many wonder about higher-RPM drives. The difference between 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM can affect performance positively, so if you can find a good drive, by all means, grab one. The difference in heat output is pretty negligible, and even on the PS3, it was never an issue.

Good luck, and get hype, the PS4 will be here SOON!

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