Is PS4 SSD Worth It? Think Before You Buy
Solid state drive (aka SSD) features the most powerful data storage solution in the digital world, due to the amazing solid performance it offers alongside the high reliability it boasts. No wonder then if it becomes the dream of every computer savvy to get one for his system, as the gains are incredibly appealing.
If you own a PC or MAC, the best hardware upgrade you can carry out is using an SSD as the primary storage device, and you’ll see then how your system is wonderfully optimized to unexpected high levels of performance to a point you won’t believe if it’s your first time with an SSD. But, is the situation similar to that of PS4? Will an SSD boost your PS4 performance the same as it does to computers? And eventually, is it really worth to pay a premium for an SSD to cram it inside PS4, or is there any other viable alternative? This article addresses these questions in some detail and tries to answer any other related question that might come to your mind in this regard.
Note that we have published several articles on PS4 SSD—The most comprehensive one is PS4 SSD Upgrade Guide that provides you with all the information you need to acquire before making up your mind on upgrading your PS4 hard drive to an SSD. As for this article, it is more focused on the subject it’s written for.
PS4 is NOT Made to Use SSD
An SSD being extremely recommended for use in computer systems doesn’t make it the same when it comes to PS4. That’s because PS4, in a nutshell, is just a low-profile computer that’s mainly designed for gaming and running some related applications.
PS4 motherboard only supports SATA II interface, an obsolete generation of SATA that offers transfer speed up to 300 MB/s, and that imposes a huge limitation on the speed of modern SSDs that require SATA III (Offers transfer speed up to 600 MB/s) to take the most advantages of it.
Moreover, PS4 CPU is not that powerful to handle the multitask requests that SSDs are primarily made for. Additionally, PS4 operating system is not coded to deal with SSDs, that is why lots of performance points will be lost if SSD is added to PS4.
SSD is too EXPENSIVE for PS4
SSDs are known to be the fastest, yet the most expensive storage devices in the markets. The cheapest branded 1tb SSD costs around $260, whereas the SAME capacity of the most expensive high-end mechanical hard drive costs around $70, which means that an SSD costs almost 4 times the price of HDD.
That’s not a big issue to someone who has a big budget, but if you look at it from a different point of view, you’ll find it worthless that high price. PS4 console currently costs around $259 on amazon, and if you’re going to get 1TB SSD for it, you have to pay the same price as the console itself, and for WHAT? for only 40% performance boost? We don’t think this is a good bargain.
If you have enough money, you can get PS4 Pro instead and upgrade its stock hard drive with an SSD, that will be much better than using an SSD with the standard PS4 model. (read more why PS4 Pro can benefit from SSDs more than PS4 standard in this article.)
SSD benefits for PS4
All what’s said doesn’t mean that SSD has no benefit at all for PS4. In fact, it does, but the benefits compared with the drawbacks doesn’t make it a good deal.
The benefits you’ll get from using an SSD in PS4 are:
- The boot-up, sleep, and wake up processes of PS4 system will be noticeably faster with an SSD. As for an SSHD, it only offers faster boot-up time here, nothing else.
- An SSD in general is the most reliable storage device. If you have a serious concern about storage device failure, then an SSD is the most trusted device for this purpose.
- SSD is the best storage solution for online gaming, especially when you have a very fast internet connection. SSD will help you move faster between game sessions, and respond instantly to your opponent reactions, whereas this is not possible on that level of speed with HDD or SSHD.
- Game and apps installation is faster with an SSD. That’s due to the high write speed an SSD boasts over all other storage media.
- Although an SSHD offers a fast game loading time that’s only a few seconds behind an SSD, the SSHD can’t cut on the time of game session shifting, whereas an SSD can.
As for SSD performance on PS4 and how fast it can be, here’s a list of games tested on an SSD in PS4 to see the speed gains an SSD offers for PS4 users:
| Game Title/Loading Time (Seconds) | PS4 500GB Stock Drive | OCZ Trion 100 480GB |
|---|---|---|
| Bloodborne – Central Yharnam | 30.8 | 16.9 |
| Bloodborne – Great Bridge | 26.1 | 15.0 |
| Bloodborne – Old Yharnam Respawn | 30.7 | 15.4 |
| Bloodborne – Return to Hunter’s Dream | 10.7 | 7.4 |
| Fallout 4 – Vault 111 | 31.7 | 17.4 |
| Fallout 4 – Exiting Vault 111 | 25.7 | 17.2 |
| Fallout 4 – Concord Town | 55.5 | 29.1 |
| Fallout 4 – Diamond City | 49.0 | 28.6 |
| Just Cause 3 – New Game | 69.9 | 43.8 |
| Just Cause 3 – First Mission Respawn | 28.9 | 21.1 |
| Just Cause 3 – Baia | 65.6 | 43.7 |
| Just Cause 3 – Baia Respawn | 23.4 | 16.2 |
You can read more details about this issue in our PS4 SSD upgrade guide or our article: PS4 SSD vs HDD.
Any Viable Alternative?
You might not be aware that SSD has a viable alternative called SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive), which features a combination between the flash-based SSD and the platter-based HDD. That way it guarantees a vast storage capacity that the mechanical hard drive offers with the high speed the SSD offers, all of that for a very reasonable price (2tb SSHD costs around $95, whereas 2tb HDD costs around $85. So it’s just a matter of $10 difference).
The best SSHD we recommend for PS4 is Seagate Firecuda 2tb SSHD. It’s known of its solid performance and reliability that can serve you up to 5 years without any major issue (Seagate provide 5-year limited warranty on this drive, which is very rare in the HDD storage industry).
We keep advising our readers to upgrade PS4 HDD with that drive due to the remarkable performance boost it offers and the capacious storage space it comes with that matches the needs of the overwhelming majority of PS4 users.
Conclusion
Here, in PS4 Storage Website, we don’t recommend using an SSD for PS4, as it will be a big waste of money for that puprose. We believe it’s totally worthless. Instead, if you’re serious about improving the performance of your game console, be confident about going to SSHD, as it offers up to 80% of performance a mere SSD does, alongside with 2tb of storage capacity that you cannot get with an SSD unless you pay about $500!
Think about it deeply before making you final step. It’s your money after all, so spend it wisely.
This article is really out of date. SSDs are cheap now. The speed gain is worth it even if you’re stuck with SATA ii.
Does anyone know if I can buy an SSD hard drive with the PS4 os pre-installed on it?
My current drive is failing (I get error messages mid-game and have to restart to let the PS4 rebuild its database) so I’m sure I’ll need to replace it soon.
I’d do it myself but I don’t have a PC or USB stick to reinstall the os and would struggle to afford to do this as I’m out of work at the moment.
I’m in the UK but don’t mind waiting for shipping it that’s an option.
It’s impossible to find what you’re seeking for. That’s because each PS4 console has its own serial number that when you install the operating system, it will be locked/encrypted for that serial number only. For that reason you can’t switch a hard drive between two consoles, you must format it and start from scratch.
I suggest that you buy an external hard drive, or a large USB flash drive to use it to back up the whole data on your current hard drive. After doing that, remove the PS4 hard drive and install the SSD in the place. Now, connect the backup external HDD and restore your data on it. That way you have installed an SSD inside the PS4 without the need for a PC or to start from the very beginning.
The entire process may just take around 2 hours.
can i use my ssd from my ps4 and put it on my pc?
Yes for sure, but you need first to format it to a relevant file system that Windows recognizes.
Like Mr. Dan commented on this being a dated article, it’s still a great article, which seems to be straight forward and unbiased in the pro’s & con department.
I’m a retired soldier from Army aviation gaming with ninja 13 year olds and any leg up, I need. I’m a emeritus staff member from Overclockers.com (most know me by my silver thermal paste articles under the moniker; silversinksam) and squeegeeing a bit of extra performance, when done right isn’t a bad thing. Been water-cooling my pc long before commercial kits became available and likely the 1st in the USA to water-cool super high wattage LED arrays using argon laser water-blocks for apiary r&d. I can push LEDs inefficiently to their upper tolerances,without the fear of cooking them. I understand performance risks and benefits.
I read this article here when you wrote it, but I came back to read it again now that SSD drives can be purchased reasonably. Picked up a 1tb SSD for $93 to kick it’s tires a bit. With PS5’s on the horizon, a simple SSD swap till then will hold me over should I decide on buying a PS5
A couple years after SSD’s came out I swapped my computer to all SSD’s as I was tired of mechanical HDD failure, and ever since migrating to SSD’s, these solid state drives will probably outlive me.
….only things stopping me from enjoying a SSD drive in my PS4p is waiting for the Amazon van to deliver it to my home. With Covid-19, next day deliveries are seldom. Appreciate you writing this article, read a few others, but their not on par with yours, so thank you, you helped me greatly, then and now.
Hi Samuel Green,
I very much appreciate your nice comment with all the details you provided, and you’re so welcome on our website.
As you have stated, this article is outdated, but still beneficial for those who have a limited-budget and cannot afford the relatively high price of SSDs.
Today, after the dramatic drop in prices, we recommend using an SSD with PS4, mainly for the high reliability an SSD offers compared to a traditional hard drive, which will start to cause errors after few months of extreme gaming, especially with the AAA titles.
Thanks for this, really informative.
You’re very welcome.
I know this is a dated article. I just disabled a SSD RAID 1 array on my primary desktop to give my PS4 Pro one of the 240gb SSDs so the PS4 could boot and run some of the games as quick as possible. My system is getting up there in age so I didn’t want to buy another 2.5″ SSD as my next system will use a much more modern M2 like format. Now that I jumped through all the hoops and got my desktop running on only one of the drives and my PS4 pro on the other I am starting to wonder if I should have even bothered. The reason? Well I just realized that this PS4 is recording 24/7 while gaming. That is alot of cache writes to the SSD drive. I know I have a fair amount of life on a SSD but using a SSD as a PVR storage device has always been on my don’t do list. I am surprised there is so little of information on this. SSD’s are listed with their maximum writes/reads as part of their specs so it is a known wearable part of using a SSD. By putting in as the main boot drive on my PS4 I noticed the drive only shows up as 170gb for the 240gb drive. Usually that drive in Windows will read as 222gb so the PS4 is utilizing about 50gb strictly for cache purposes. I really don’t want to put that much massive workload on what should be mostly a read only environment.
I am thinking now I will just put the stock 1TB HDD back in as the boot drive and if anything use that 240gb SSD in an external storage device as long as it ain’t being used as the recording cache storage. Really odd that there is so little information on this.
Using an SSD as an external storage device on PS4 will not benefit you much. It will only give you little improvement. As for your worry about the consistent writing processes on your SSD, you shouldn’t worry much if you have a high-end level SSD, something like Samsung SSD 850/860 Pro. Even the Evo version has a very long endurance according to many IT professionals who tested it.
You can only worry if it’s an entry-level drive. Or a drive that has been used for years now. If this is your case, then yes, you should worry.
By the way, the mechanical hard drives cannot last too long in such an environment. They even die much faster than SSDs. So, be careful.
Interesting. Is it possible to disable to auto recording? Also does cache write decrease your performance?