How to Choose the Best PS4 Hard Drive Replacement?

When you make a quick search on Google for replacing the internal hard drive of PS4, you’ll find many articles that address this topic. Most of them will directly recommend particular hard drives to use for PS4 based on the author’s own standards. On the other hand, you can rarely find an educational article that gives a real value to the topic discussed.

In fact, before you buy a PS4 hard drive replacement, you have to know that based on what standards you made up your mind. Is it just because the author that you trust recommended a specific hard drive, so you just follow him? Just as simple as that without even knowing how he chose that drive and what his key factors were?

Here, in this short article you’ll learn how to choose the right PS4 hard drive replacement that perfectly suits your needs. That’s because, according to various factors, not all users need the same drive. These factors you’re going to learn soon in this article, then you’ll know exactly what PS4 HDD replacement you need.

Note that what you’ll learn here suits all models of PS4. So, whether you have the base PS4, PS4 Slim or PS4 Pro, this article is valid for you to read.

Why to Replace PS4 Hard Drive?

This is a critical question here—Why urges you to replace the PS4 HDD in the first place? Also, is it a matter of luxury or necessity? Well, let’s first get acquainted to the PS4 hard drive and explore its specifications. That’s in order to have a better assessment on this matter. That will help us in future make the right decision.

PS4 Hard Drive Specs

We’ll not go deep in the technical stuff here. We just need to know the basic specifications of the PS4 hard drive to get a better picture of what drive we target to replace. \

In fact, PS4 stock hard drive is just a slow and outdated mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) that no longer conforms to the modern storage standards. This drive comes with SATA II interface and 500gb/1tb of storage capacity. Its spindle speed is 5400RPM and its overall performance is not so pleasing. It might suits kids or random PS4 users, but serious gamers are not happy at all with it.

You can read more details on the specifications of PS4 hard drive. If you own PS4 Pro, you can read the PS4 Pro HDD specs in detail as well.

Is it Worth the Upgrade/Replacement?

So, is it worth replacing PS4 hard drive with a better and new drive?

Well, the answer is not straightforward. You have to discover what type of user you’re first before answering that question.

The PS4 stock hard drive is still a good choice for many users, especially kids. They don’t need the top-notch performance modern drives offer, especially that their games are not so resource-demanding. But adults who have heavy games to play, let alone enthusiasts, surely will consider a PS4 hard drive replacement.

The Valid Reasons

Well, if you have your PS4 for more than a year now, and you play average 2-3 hours daily, you’d surely notice storage-related errors occurring within the PS4 system. Wouldn’t you?

Errors like slow PS4 and lagging, or sometimes game crash issues, or even the very common error message: “Cannot start the PS4. Cannot access system storage. CE-34335-8“. These errors, if you haven’t experienced them yet, you’ll surely do in the near future. That’s because old drives needs regular maintenance and they degrade faster than modern ones.

So, in brief, the PS4 stock hard drive suffers from many reliability issues. These issues will vividly appear when playing high-end games with AAA titles.

As for speed, any modern hard drive is faster than that 9-years-old drive that PS4 is using, especially if you go for an SSHD or, even better, an SSD.

As for the limited storage capacity, it’s not now a big issue after PS4 supported the extended storage feature. You can choose one of the PS4 compatible external hard drives or just go and pick the best external drives we recommend.

But remember! Replacing the PS4 hard drive with a better drive offers higher performance rate and a better gaming experience. Whereas just adding an external HDD to PS4 only offers additional storage space.

Available PS4 HDD Replacment Options

There are three types of internal storage devices that fit for replacing the PS4 HDD—Classical hard disk drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD), and Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD). Each of these drives has its own cons and pros.

We have made two comparisons that will enlighten you better on this topic. SSD vs SSHD for PS4, and SSD vs HDD for PS4.

Moreover, if you’re considering going for an external hard drive instead, please read this post: PS4 external HDD vs internal.

Factors to Consider for the Best PS4 HDD Replacement

Here are several factors to investigate in order to pick the right PS4 HDD replacement that suits your needs.

Price

When looking at pricing, don’t just look to see which one was the cheapest. Instead, look at which hard drive gives you the best bang for your buck.

The winner here was Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSHD. It gives you 2TB worth of storage and gives a nice boost to your system’s performance for not much of a price increase over a 2TB HDD.

Storage Size

More than nine out of ten times, if you are looking for a new hard drive for your console, it is because you don’t have any room left on your current one and you’re tired of trying to figure out which games or apps to delete.

If this is your only concern, try to get an external hard drive instead of an internal. It’s much easier to set up (just a few minutes and it’s will be ready for use). But if you want a combination of vast storage capacity and performance boost, you need to upgrade the internal HDD of PS4.

Speed

Speed is something that we all want in the performance of our system, and an SSD for PS4 is going to give you more speed than you could ask for. Dropping loading times of games like The Witcher 3’s start uploading times from 92.5 seconds all the way down to 67.5 seconds, and give you smoother gameplay letting environments render faster on screen.

Unfortunately, Solid State Drives aren’t going to make much difference than SSHD for you if you aren’t using a PS4 Pro. Yes, you can still benefit from the high reliability of SSD and the 40-50% additional performance boost, but an SSHD can save you lots of money here. So the hard drive with the best all-around speed performance would have to go to the Seagate FireCuda. You won’t get all of the benefits of a solid state, but hybrid drives still offer a noticeable speed boost to your system.

Compatibility

It is vitally important that your hard drive is compatible with your PS4. The more items you have to get to make it fit your system, the more you have to spend to get your PlayStation running optimally.

What you need to know first is that not just any drive can be put into a PS4 or PS4 Pro. They use a smaller 2.5-inch drive size, and the maximum vertical clearance for the drives is 9.5mm. Internal drives need to be greater than 160GB, and external storage needs to connect over USB 3.0 (or greater, as USB is backwards compatible) and have a capacity between 250GB and 8TB.

You can read more details on this topic in this post: PS4 hard drive compatibility.

Conclusion

It’s not really that difficult to choose the right hard drive replacement for PS4. You only need to know first what type of user you are. Are you a lightweight user or heavyweight? If you’re the first, but need additional storage capacity, you better just buy an external hard drive. Don’t waste money or efforts for replacing the internal HDD if you don’t need it.

Otherwise, enthusiasts and power users must replace the PS4 internal HDD if they need the performance advantage new hard drives offer, especially SSDs.