The regular PS4 has a SATA2 port, which means it can transfer 3 Gbit per second, which is 300 Megabyte per second. It can fill the PS4's 8GB of RAM in 27 seconds.
The PS4pro has a SATA3 port, which means it can transfer 6 Gbit per second, which is 600 Megabyte per second. It can fill the PS4's 8GB of RAM in 13.5 seconds
No regular hard disk one would ever consider putting in a PS4 of any kind can do more than 200 MB per second in the best of scenarios. Your off the rack 4TB-8TB hard disk will do somewhere around 150 Megabyte, making Sata3 utterly pointless. So your hard disk will take 54.5 seconds to fill the 8GB or RAM in the PS4.
SSDs on the other hand can easily do 550 Megabyte per second. They can fill the PS4's 8GB of RAM in 15 seconds. Check the speed before buying. For people interested in putting an SSD into their PS4pro, Sata3 is a welcome upgrade.
Here is how loading times will still screw you over.
It is a folly to believe that a game loads in a third or quarter of the time because the hard disk can shovel data 3-4 times faster. Loading a level is more than just transferring data. Think of loading as the process where somebody dumps an entire box of Legos in front of you and commands you to assemble them. Sure, if you have an SSD the Legos are dumped in front of you much faster, but whether that improves the overall process is a question of where the bottle neck was in the first place. Are you able to process the Legos as fast as they come in? Do you need x amount of seconds to assemble the Legos and even a slow hard drive can toss them your way fast enough?
As somebody putting an SSD into a PS4, you obviously did the best you could to remove the bottle neck of data transfer. What you do not have any control over is how fast the game engine can initialize the level after getting the raw data dump. So whether your SSD speeds up things or not depends on whether it was the bottle neck in the first place. You optimize one factor of many in the process called loading.
In an online game, you also need time to get the server state, ideally a parallel load (Titanics cruncher decrunches while loading for those who remember), but too often a second and separate loading phase. Which then triggers another round of loading from the hard drive, since the game is only now loading the required player textures, instead of loading all of them before.
Do not expect wonders from SSDs either, they truly can improve load times, but they do not have to. The main advantage of the SSD isn't even the fast load times, it is the access speed. A normal hard drive still basically works like your old vinyl records. Sure, the technology is pushed to its limits when it comes to the speed at which the head jumps to the right spot, a good hard drive can do up to 100 random IO operations per second. This is also the point where the importance of RPM come into play. Hard disks with higher RPMs do better when it comes to random reading operations. A 5400 RPM drive has to wait longer for the random read to finish before it can readjust its arm, even if the 5400 could technically read data as fast as the 7200RPM drive, in reality it will not, since data is hardly ever arranged on a disk in such a way that the needle will stay in one place long enough. All of that is meaningless though, since an average SSD will do around 100.000 operations per second. Meaning your load times do not even have to get faster because of SATA3 being faster than SATA2, but simply because of the SSD not being a mechanical device with arms readjusting their position constantly.
At the end of the day, most PS4s will have regular hard drives. If you have loading screens between levels, you have linear loads, which hard disks can do reasonably well and SATA3 or SATA2 does not make any difference. An SSD might, but also might not. If you have big open worlds which stream in the data as you move through them, every developer will have to make sure it runs off a regular hard disk. An SSD could stream in worlds with a higher fidelity, but the as long as SSDs are not the default storage medium, developers cannot make use of that. So yes, one way for Microsoft to screw over Sony really hard with the Scorpio is not so much the processing power (they both buy the same AMD technologies), but to put 500GB SSDs in every device.
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