My number one reason for buying a ps4 right now is not the drm free restrictions because honestly I'm going to go all digital. As I've gotten older I realize I want to keep my games especially if keeps me from buying more games than I can play.

So what I'm excited about is the ability to put pretty much any kind of hard drive into my ps4. I already know I'm going to opt for a SSD since I'm going to play digital games. I can't say for sure, but I think its already been confirmed that xbone won't allow a SSD option or if there is one it will most likely be a ways down the line and require a MS license. Now you might say you can use usb 3.0 external hard drives, and to that I say those hard drives are shit. They have a high fail rate and from what I know they are far more expensive. I don't feel like getting ripped off by microsoft or wasting more than I have to on a hard drive.

What.

External Hard Drives are just regular hard drives with a usb controller hooked up to it.

@playastation: http://www.newegg.com/External-SSD/SubCategory/ID-2022?Tid=11690these are the options for external ssd hard drives not much to choose from there they cost about twice as much as internal SSDs.

Hopefully for you SSDers it's not like the PS3 where putting an SSD in it made zero improvement on anything.

@devilzrule27: that was the processor and memory constraints, but sometimes its just the game. My friend upgraded to an SSD for Old republic and put in a much more powerful processor but still got hit by the terrible load times in that game. That was because of how bad the servers were in SWTOR which who knows how often that problem will persist in this gen.

@chrollo: Do you know the specifics of what type of hard drives they're gonna be using, as I'm already looking to get one for when I get the PS4.

...I don't think anyone is arguing with you...

When I play steam games, I usually play a game, and it'll sit on my hard drive after I finish it for maybe a few months, and then I delete it.

I'm sure your all digital solution will work with both solutions.

The MS non-ssd thing is kind of a bummer though.

You could buy a regular SSD and mount it in a USB 3.0 case. But I think the USB 3 thoughput will still be a choke point, not allowing for the full SSD speed.

I just don't get the craze over SSD's. They're really expensive for far less space and all you get is a few seconds shaved off of loading times. Is the smaller storage space and the slightly shorter load times really worth that extra cost?

Anyway, do we have any sort of confirmation that SSD's will even work with PS4's?

EDIT: Duders, I know that the idea is to have your OS and games on a SSD and everything else on a regular HDD, but I still don't see the benefits when you could have two massive HDD's for what one small (relatively) SSD costs. On a good gaming computer, the difference can't be anything more than a few seconds considering that my fairly good PC can boot in a matter of seconds and load times on pretty much any game only takes a few seconds as well.

I will wait until the next Elder Scrolls game comes out to put an SSD in my PS. The difference between even a 5400rpm on Xbox and 7200rpm on PC HDD load time on Skyrim was enormous, so the thought of playing the next Elder Scrolls while cutting out literally hours of waiting is immensely appealing. By then SSd's will be even cheaper, and even getting a slower one will still be a big improvement over 7200rpm so it shouldn't be a huge investment.

Both consoles are using the same AMD base Jaguar architecture which support 2 x SATA 6 Gbit/s ports.

Xbox One:

An SSD put into a external USB 3.0 caddie would outperform the 5400rpm HDD the initial SKU is shipping with. The USB 3.0 would mean you wouldn't be getting the full potential of the SSD.

Then again as the HDD is internal and not user replaceable maybe they haven't locked them down and you could just put a different drive in from new (But I doubt it as it isn't really MS's style.)

PS4:

Shove the SSD in it will just work. A SSD is definitely on my post release shopping list.

@lutonhatter: this pretty much sums it up everything on ps3 is simple from sticking in a hard drive or buying a used game or getting netflix without ps+ im used to paying for multiplayer from being an original xbox live gold member but ps+ more than pays for its sel by giving me a new 60 dollar game for free day one

Yeah I don't get it either. I'd rather have all the space versus the faster load times. At least for the time being. I assume at one point SSD's will get to the point of a total replacement rather than a novel upgrade.

Put one in your PC and you'll get it. Even when they were 60GB most people who had them wouldn't trade them for a regular HDD. I have one in my PC and I had one in my PS3. Negligible but still noticeable improvement on the PS3 and on PC it was amazing. Instant boot times on games and just turning on the PC. There is a reason they're becoming more the standard than the exception.

This.

Stealth-Horse Guys.... STEALTH-HORSE.

But Windows 8 already boots nearly instantly for me and games load in a matter of seconds on a plain old 7200 RPM 1TB HDD. Here are the search results on Newegg for a 1TB ssd; I paid $80 for mine, if I remember correctly. That's worth it?

@believer258: All I can tell you is that you have to put one in your PC to understand. It's not quite like this but it's almost like how the SDTV people were saying that an HDTV wasn't that big of a deal until they got one of their own. It's the "oh, now I get it", moment.

i just rent games. i can't be bothered to play games for any more than a week unless it's an mmo.

@believer258: You don't need to put everything on your SSD. Just prioritize what's most important for you to load really quickly. I recommend only putting your operating system, your game saves, and most of your programs that don't require a lot of space onto an SSD. Every little thing you do that involves Windows shaves off many seconds of your time, and those seconds add up really fast!

Would be interested to find out the benefits of an SSD when used in conjunction with PS4. Maybe Digital Foundry will take a look around launch.

I know that not everything goes on an SSD if you have one - you can just buy a small one - but I just don't see the value. I'd rather pay way less money and get way more storage and wait a few extra seconds, and put that extra money toward another HDD or a better graphics card or new games or something.

But, hey, if those few seconds improve your PC gaming experience that much, then go for it.

An SSD is not the tool for the job if you want a lot of storage space. Keep your 1TB for pictures, images and other data files. Get one of these for your OS, applications and games.

Of course, if you're happy about your current performance, then there's no need to upgrade right now. But the SSDs are almost 4 times as fast as a regular HDD. I'd say getting a SSD is almost as important the CPU these days for everyday performance.

Normally, I'd agree with you, but if this quick way of serving out games on the PS4 via PSN actually works the way they're saying it will, it won't really matter as much that you have more storage locally. Normally, I jam pack my hard drive with every game I could possibly want to play, but I'd be okay deleting games to install new ones if the process of getting that game back was faster and I didn't have to wait for the whole thing to finish downloading to start playing. This is all what I'm most sceptical about with the PS4.

I'm sure you probably know this but if you have a rig with an SSD, you'll most likely have an HDD with 1-3 TB of storage as well where you'll be storing your other documents and files but have OS and programs on your SSDs. I've always thought that you'd need to have either both or if you can only choose one, it'd have to be an HDD and not an SSD.

I'm sure your SSD will make up for all the time lost downloading & installing patches from PSN.

Beyond just having to experience it to get it, which is true, they're also silent. And I don't know about you, but in my average inexpensive case with little to no sound insulation, my HDD is loud as fuck sometimes, and that shit annoys me to no end.

That's why I have a 256GB SSD and a 2TB HDD. There is a very noticeable difference. My MBP doesnt have an SSD, but my PC does and the PC is much faster on loading things. Anything from opening programs to booting up or even searching for files. Everything is instant.

I consider it the single most effective upgrade to any aging laptop, I put a 120gb Kingston HyperMax in my three year old Toshiba and on a clean install my boot time went from a solid three minutes to <25 seconds. It feels like a much newer machine. For less than $100 I couldn't be happier.

I may not have read this correctly but couldn't you already switch out hard drives on the PS3?

@mason20: yes, but you won't see a dramatic performance increase in load times. Although having games on the hard drive is much much much quiter

The only bummer is that any form of SSD (even hybrid) isn't standard for any of the consoles, I was hoping that it would be, because while games benefit from SSDs there would be a lot more interesting things happen for them if they were guaranteed to be included and used, games would optimize to take advantage of them specifically. I mean I do notice that Skyrim initially loads crazy faster on my SSD (like 5 seconds with a billion mods, where as without the ssd even just a few mods it could take upwards of 1min to load) but for other things that ssds could also really speed up like streaming textures and content... doesn't happen as noticeably because most games either toss that stuff in ram to load faster or do other things that just happen to not really improve by ssds by default.

So I'm just bummed out that it's not a thing developers can count on for consoles, because what's in the consoles by default is what drives games at their core, everything else is an edge case that gets almost no attention (rightfully so in most cases).

I read that as "Solid Snake" argument at first.

I have nothing else to add.

@djjoejoe: lets hope for a 5 year console cycle :(

@chrollo said:

Let's not. Beyond faster load times (which I didn't feel were obnoxious enough this gen to justify a big increase in price and/or decrease in space), what else would an SSD actually improve?

@chibithor: I believe they put off less heat than a spinning hard drive and could potentially be smaller allowing hard ware designers more room and for vents or graphics/processor which generates more heat plus SSDS have less moving parts so they should be more stable and less defective

@djjoejoe: You really don't need a game to be optimized to make use of an SSD. I mean, I'm sure it wouldn't hurt, but it's not really needed. The thing to keep in mind, though is that while we know the PS4 will most likely use a standard 2.5" laptop HDD and thus will use a SATA connection, that's about all we know. Is it SATA rev. 1, SATA rev. 2, or SATA rev. 3? My guess is it's at least rev. 2 but the throughput has doubled with each revision, so it's key to if the PS4 could even make use of the extra throughput and IOPS of an SSD. Also, there is the issue of TRIM/garbage collection. Without proper TRIM support, an SSD will significantly slow down over time and if there is no garbage collection at all, even after you delete stuff form the drive, the SSD would eventually appear to the system as if completely full until it is reset. Being that Sony isn't putting an SSD into the PS4, they might not figure to give the PS4 those features.

SSDs are most useful at bootup, when the OS is trying to load hundreds of files and programs all at once. That is where the exponentially higher IOPS numbers are put to use best, but seeing as Microsoft and Sony are both talking about the speed of their new system OSs, my guess is they're already speeding that up some other way (also a dedicated games console has a lot less system overhead than a multipurpose PC, so it's probably trying to load significantly fewer files to begin with.

tl;dr: I wouldn't buy an SSD to drop into your PS4 just yet. Wait until we know more about the innards and Sony's support for SSDs in the PS4 before you do, but performance won't be as improved as HDD -> SSD in a PC regardless.

@chrollo: It's cool to have to option of putting one in I guess, but considering the difference in cost and how much space we'll need for the next gen, it still doesn't sound like a good deal (especially with what @graf1k is saying).

I wouldn't say zero improvement. Some games improved greatly. Just depended on how much said game needed to access the SSD while playing. I remember hearing the GT5 cut load times in nearly half with an SSD.

Wouldn't you want at least a 7200 RPM drive? Anyone know what RPM the basic PS4 hard drive?

Because a lot of data is being loaded, and stuff constantly streaming from the drive, I'd want one that is at least as fast as the basic drive.

SSDs are still too expensive for price to storage space, especially for just a game console.

SSDs causing bricking on PS3 in the last firmware,. yeah not gonna replace stock hdd ever.

The better price to storage ratio is from a 'hybrid drive' the incorporates a small SSD and a larger traditional HDD. The very newest 3rd generation 'hybrid drives' are nearly as fast as an SSD, yet are price affordable and have the capacity a gamer would need.

When you think about it you are going to have 5 to 7 years with the PS4, so why buy the most expensive drive you can find in Nov 2013?

I look for to people benchmarking SSDs performance on PS4 for me.

I wish Sony could have put an SSD in it - but the cost is too great. Maybe in 8 years.

I will try and get the 1TB PS4 version when it eventually comes out. If it doesn't, I may still buy some games on disk.

I'm just going to pop out the 500GB HD the PS4 comes with as soon as I get it and replace it with a 1TB drive. Should be pretty simple.

I have nothing to add other than when i saw the thread title i thought it said "Solid Snake" not "Solid State"