How to pick a hard drive for your PS4 hard drive upgrade. The standard PS4 HD is 500gb but games are going to be nearly 50gb each which doesn't leave much room to store your games or digitally download them.
The good news is that Sony made it really easy for the average Joe to upgrade their PS4. All you need is a standard Phillips screw driver and your ready to go.
PS4 Hard Drive Upgrade – Here are the current PS4 HD specs that you need to consider.
- 2.5 Inches (The standard laptop size internal HD will be 2.5 inches but desktops also can use this size)
- 9.5mm Size ( 9.5mm Laptop size internal HD)
- 500gb Size (Capacity to hold data)
- 5400 RPM (How fast the HD operates)
- Sata II (How fast data can be transferred)
With all that said you MUST make sure you search for 2.5 inches and 9.5mm when you are looking for a new hard drive, anything bigger and you will be returning it.
There are a couple PS4 Hard Drive Upgrade recommendations that will help you find a HD within your budget.
- Size – 1TB (1000GB+) – There really is no use getting anything in between 500gb and 1 TB. A 500gb model will get you the same storage and 750gb will only get you another 5 games worth of storage
- RPM – 5400 is Standard for hard drives but you really want to get a 7200RPM HD. 10000RPM and 15000RPM drives are not even available over 1TB yet and I personally wouldn't spend $350 on a 10000RPM drive that is only 600MB. Also note that on laptops the higher the RPM the more power it will consume, since your console is plugged in you will not have to worry about battery life
- Sata – Sata II can transfer data at a maximum of 3.0 gb/s while Sata III can transfer up to 6.0 gb/s. You really want a Sata III drive if you are upgrading. Sata III is backwards compatible to Sata II. (Note) It is confirmed that the PS4 uses Sata II so while your drive will be Sata III it will use the Sata II speeds
What about SSD (Solid Slate Drive)? SSD is still fairly new and very expensive to buy. The overall size capacity of SSD drives that are available are fractional compared to non SSD.
Can I buy an external hard drive? Unfortunately not, external HDs will not work for the PS4 the way you want it to. Games will not be allowed to be played directly from an external hard drive.
With all that being said after searching through Newegg and Amazon there are limited options available at this time. The 1TB 5400RPM drive and the 500gb 7200RPM drive are pretty much the same price as the 1TB 7200RPM drives.
