Playstation 4 Hard Drive Read Write Speed

UPDATE: 25/8/fourteen 12:54pm - Looking for a inexpensive 2TB upgrade for your PlayStation 4? A couple of months afterward publishing our original guide to upgrading your PS4 difficult bulldoze, nosotros put together this this slice on the best value 2TB upgrade path we could find, comparing its functioning to the replacement drives nosotros discuss in-depth below.

Looking at private components of the PlayStation four, Sony'southward brand-new hardware is annihilation from 6x to 16x more powerful than its predecessor - only there'south one surface area that has remained completely unchanged. The PS4's 500GB 5400rpm difficult drive isn't simply of a like spec to the PS3 Super Slim'southward - on our launch model at to the lowest degree, it's really the verbal same unit of measurement. Thankfully, this is the 1 role of the hardware that users are free to upgrade themselves - so that'due south exactly what we did.

Our objectives here are twofold. On the one hand, with game installs often ranging from 20-50GB, information technology's clear that the PS4'due south stock hard bulldoze can fill up pretty chop-chop - and then we're interested in getting the most cost-efficient upgrade. Merely more that, we wanted to meet what happens when the standard difficult bulldoze is replaced with meliorate, faster technology. Would we see faster kicking times? A more responsive front-end? Would games load quicker? Would intrusive streaming issues and popular-in be resolved?

It'south a topic we've been thinking virtually for some time, but simply now do nosotros really have a wide enough range of software to examination in order to come up upwardly with some tangible results worthy of a buyer'southward guide. For instance, as nosotros mentioned in our Confront-Off, Square-Enix'due south Thief suffers from some poor frame-pacing issues which announced to be related to streaming new avails from the difficult drive. Meanwhile, the contempo release of RedLynx's Trials Fusion allows us to put virtual texturing engineering science - likewise seen in id software's Rage - to the test. On PS3, swapping to a improve drive could massively improve the cohesiveness of the game'due south presentation. Could we run across similar improvements on PS4, with the added bonus of more space to shop our games and media?

"Each component of the PlayStation 4 is a articulate generational spring over its PS3 equivalent - except for the hard drive."

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And then, what are the drives we've chosen to test? After all, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, bachelor on the market, and a fair few in our function collection too. We decided to narrow our choices down to three quite particular upgrades. First upwardly we have the Hitachi Z7K1000 - a 7200rpm 1TB drive that is effectively a larger, faster version of the stock unit. It's a popular choice owing its faster rotational speeds and neat price point (£53/$75). Adjacent we take the 240GB Crucial M500 SSD. It costs around £85/$120, so you have a massive hit in terms of toll per gig, but with the do good of flash storage you have instant access to any point on the bulldoze and much faster throughput. And finally we take the Seagate 1TB hybrid SSD/HDD (£69/$95). This has a adept quality 5400rpm bulldoze backed up by 8GB of flash storage, with the drive itself caching oft-used areas of the disk to memory for faster access. But would that actually brand any deviation on PS4? Our tests on PS3 showed a petty promise, but overall proved inconclusive...

Before we move on, it's likewise worth pointing out that there are at least 2 different 500GB 5400rpm drives that nosotros know of doing the rounds inside the PS4: the Hitachi Z5K500, and another drive of similar spec manufactured by Samsung. Our console shipped with the Hitachi drive, although we imagine that performance shouldn't be that unlike betwixt the two in order to ensure that the core feel is closely matched between PS4 units - it wouldn't be wise for Sony to choose drives with noticeably different characteristics.

Basic tests: benchmarking the drives

To kicking things off, permit's kickoff with a few basic tests to determine the raw performance of each unit, carried out using PC tools Crystal Disk Mark and Hard disk Tune. Doing this allows us to see exactly what each bulldoze is capable of in a tightly controlled mode, and should give us some strong indications as to where the potential benefits might lie.

For the most office the results are pretty much as we expected: we see articulate increases in read/write speeds over the stock PS4 hard drive with both the 7200rpm HDD and the SSD. In particular, sequential read/write speeds are nigh twice as fast in the SSD compared to the stock PS4 drive, and access times (basically, the time it takes the drive to move from one file to the next) are virtually non-real - latency is inside 0.1ms, compared to 12ms and higher for the other drives. On PS3, the admission fourth dimension was by far the most important factor in deciding on an upgrade - afterwards price per gig, of course.

"Can a drive upgrade deliver more than than just extra space? In our tests, we put a faster 7200rpm bulldoze, a hybrid SSD/HDD and a full-on SSD through their paces."

We tested three popular options - the Hitachi Z7K1000: cheapest 1TB 7200rpm drive we could observe, the 1TB Seagate hybrid SSD/HDD and for raw, top-end performance, a 240GB Crucial M500 SSD.

	Stock Drive	1TB Hitachi Z7K1000	1TB Seagate Hybrid	240GB Crucial M500 SSD
Read Speed (Sequential/512K)	116.5MB/s / 40.4MB/s	132.9MB/south / 42.6MB/s	95.9MB/southward / 40.6MB/s	191.9MB/due south / 189.7MB/s
Write Speed (Sequential/512K)	114.4MB/s / 40.7MB/s	127.9MB/s / 55.7MB/s	106.7MB/s / 62.8MB/s	211.8MB/s / 62.7MB/s
Access Time	21.1ms	17.3ms	6.9ms to 20.9ms	0.06ms

Club our comparing difficult drive drives with gratuitous shipping:

• 1TB Hitachi Z7K100 from Amazon UK or Amazon US.
• 1TB Seagate SSHD Hybrid from Amazon Great britain or Amazon US.
• 240GB Crucial M500 SSD from Amazon UK or Amazon U.s.a..

Judging by previous PS3 functioning tests, lower-latency access should lead to noticeably faster installs as the data tin can exist more quickly unpacked and candy compared to mechanical storage drives. Interestingly, metrics for the hybrid drive initially prove disappointing, presenting u.s. with considerably lower read/write speeds compared to the other drives - information technology's possible that the unit'due south 5400rpm platters are the cause hither. However, re-running the benchmarks multiple times has a dramatic event on access times - reducing from an unremarkable 20.9ms downwards to a minimum of 6.9ms - what we're seeing here is the bulldoze firmware adapting to the SSD caching and providing a remarkable boost. It'southward all the same not equally fast equally SSD, but information technology's 3 times faster than the stock bulldoze.

Ultimately, these benchmarks confirm that the SSD is much faster than the other drives, and has the potential to significantly improve specific areas in functioning where the PS4's HDD is the bottleneck. The hybrid SSHD is something of a mixed bag based on read/write performance alone. Notwithstanding, if the bulldoze's 'learning' software can successfully shop the most commonly accessed data into the onboard flash memory, then it might be possible to see improvements to bring it closer into line with the SSD.

Yet, if there's 1 thing our PS3 testing taught us, information technology was that while the PC is a great test-bed for discerning the raw limits of a potential difficult drive upgrade, it'southward very rare indeed for the console to get anything like pinnacle-end performance. We suspect it's the aforementioned state of affairs with PS4 - we copied off a Battlefield game capture via USB 3.0 to an external SSD and discovered a relatively slow 22.46MB/s read speed from the stock drive. At present, this may well be a limitation of the USB controller, simply speeds were similarly limited on PS3 besides.

Booting the PS4, front-end performance and game installs

Our first test yields instant dividends. With each of our replacement drives we encounter a singled-out boost in speed in the front-end, kick off with a few seconds getting shaved off the time it takes for the console to kick up. Icons for the various games and apps we have installed besides announced more quickly. Bigger storage means more content, and the ability to navigate the front-terminate speedily and efficiently definitely helps.

The hybrid drive also puts in a reasonable performance here once the console has been running for a couple of hours. Initially we saw very little improvement, just the drive does appear to 'learn' which content it should be accessing from the flash retention, resulting in a mild speed boost over the standard hard drives. In comparing, both HDDs gave usa similar boot results, with little to distinguish between them, though full general front-end performance was a touch smoother on the upgrade.

"Each of our upgrade drives managed to better both boot times and the general fluidity of the PS4 interface."

Operation analysis of the stock PS4 difficult drive up against our three upgrade rivals - all of them manage to boot the organisation more quickly, with interface navigation besides improved.

	Stock Drive	1TB Hitachi Z7K1000	1TB Seagate Hybrid	240GB Crucial M500 SSD
Boot Time (seconds)	12.75	12.15	x.10	08.32

In terms of disc-based games, installation times are mostly bound by the slow read speed and seeking of the PS4's Blu-ray bulldoze, which is a lot slower than whatsoever modern difficult drive. Data needs to exist read from the optical drive and written to the hard drive - a two-function procedure, and 1 where we can only improve one stage of the process. This limits the potential to really cut down install times past large amounts, although it'due south all the same possible to yield some improvement one time the information reaches the hard drive.

On the whole, the SSD manages to cut down install times past effectually 8-x seconds in Call Of Duty: Ghosts, Thief and Need for Speed: Rivals, with these games taking nigh a infinitesimal to install when using the stock PS4 HDD. In comparison, the hybrid SSHD and 7200rpm HDD still manage to manus in decent speed boosts over the stock hard bulldoze only the improvements are not exactly revelatory. In the case of the hybrid SSHD, this drive is but limited by the 5400rpm platters, which accept a tangible touch on on access times. A simple install is unlikely to call the flash memory into operation. In our PS3 drive tests, the older generation hybrids had lower amounts of wink retention, but they were backed past faster 7200rpm drives - we would accept preferred the all-time of both worlds hither.

Overall though, it'southward clear that while there are some differences, the likely touch of the drive upgrade in performance terms tin can't really be measured. The Blu-ray bulldoze itself is the major limiting cistron.

"Our install tests showed relatively small-scale gains beyond the drives - with the toll premium of the SSD and hybrid drives not really justified by the operation heave."

Installs generally see most improvement on the SSD, with smaller boosts to performance on the other drives. On a broader level, gains are more than substantial installing PSN downloads compared to streaming off a Blu-ray retail disc.

Install Time (secs)	Stock Bulldoze	1TB Hitachi Z7K1000	1TB Seagate Hybrid	240GB Crucial M500 SSD
COD: Ghosts - Retail	51.88	55.lx	55.27	49.thirteen
Thief - Retail	l.59	48.49	fifty.59	45:32
MGS5: Ground Zeroes - Retail	twenty.48	eighteen.23	17.23	17.80
NFS Rivals - Retail	33.22	31.12	30.56	26.42
Trials Fusion - PSN	22.88	22.08	18.47	17.xxx
Lego Marvel Super Heroes - PSN	22.15	20.78	23.48	17.28
Rayman Legends - PSN	19.33	13.22	19.45	12.20
Resogun - PSN	08.17	04.63	06.93	03.07


Installation of digitally downloaded content provides the states with a slightly different picture. Hither the speed of information access is determined primarily by difficult drive functioning - particularly access times. Much more than is asked of the bulldoze here - it has to read data from 1 area of the drive and write information technology in another. Information technology's a significantly tougher conditioning. However, gains across the lath from our upgrades are however somewhat muted - though the comeback seen in Rayman Legends suggest that faster drives could mitt in a much stronger performance given a larger game to install.

Overall, the SSD wins beyond the lath delivering the shortest install times in all PSN downloaded games nosotros tested, but the calibration of the increase varies considerably, calling into question the value of the upgrade bearing in mind how much you lose in terms of cost per gig. There's a sense that mean solar day-to-twenty-four hours console performance feels a lilliputian faster paired upwards with an SSD, even though this actress speed boost varies across different games and situations: boot times are reduced and application icons on the dash popular upwards more quickly. Performance varies on the other drives, and while there are improvements, the overall feel is much closer to the stock drive. What'due south clear is that install times can exist improved with an upgrade, but there'due south inappreciably a revelatory comeback, and fifty-fifty the SSD doesn't quite alive up to expectations.

Loading times is a rosier picture show in some games - we meet all of our drives paw in observable boosts over the standard stock drives, and on occasion we see thunderously good loading times with the SSD. Withal, these are the exception rather than the rule, and despite its technological disadvantages, the 5400rpm stock drive isn't that much slower than the upgrades. Although disappointing in some respects, it's actually good news in others - why spend the extra money on a hybrid drive, when a 2TB 5400rpm unit isn't that much more expensive? Information technology seems that just similar PS3 upgrades, price per gig is the biggest consideration in choosing a new HDD.

"Loading times improve - sometimes essentially - with our upgrade drives, but we'd still take toll per gig as the master gene in deciding which drive to cull."

Generally speaking, loading times are improved with faster drives - especially on SSD - but perhaps not to the level you'd expect based on the same components running from a PC.

Loading Fourth dimension (secs)	Stock Drive	1TB Hitachi Z7K1000	1TB Seagate Hybrid	240GB Crucial M500 SSD
COD: Ghosts - Initial Load	23.60	19.67	19.22	xvi.53
COD: Ghosts - Ghost Stories	38.25	33.22	thirty.10	28.80
COD: Ghosts - Struck Down	29.22	27.thirteen	26.85	26.85
Thief - Level One Load	52.08	34.67	34.67	34.43
Thief - Level 2 Load	23.50	20.98	23.01	21.04
Thief - Level Three Load	38.97	37.12	36.72	35.57
MGS5: Footing Zeroes - Initial Load	44.93	43.30	41.67	32.82
MGS5: Ground Zeroes - Renegade Threat	fifteen.33	14.13	xv.20	fourteen.43
MGS5: Basis Zeroes - Classified Intel	14.71	fourteen.76	14.79	thirteen.98
NFS: Rivals - Initial Load	eighteen.25	eighteen.14	17.59	16.40
NFS: Rivals - First Game	24.85	24.85	25.10	23.17
NFS: Rivals - To Race	eleven.01	ten.91	x.84	ten.74
Trials Fusion - Initial Load	04.70	04.52	03.82	04.42
Trials Fusion - Stage Ane	15.11	13.17	xiii.10	13.10
Trials Fusion - Waterworks	13.01	09.67	09.62	09.62

Tin a difficult drive upgrade boost game performance?

While the PS4 has upwards to 5GB of RAM available for use in games, filling that space up isn't easy - users could be faced with extremely long loading times, and having all the assets in RAM for a particular level/stage limits the potential to accept more varied details on screen. In order to become around these bug, many games employ the PS4'southward hard drive every bit a cache, streaming graphics data into RAM when needed. Trials Fusion is ane such title and uses a like organisation to the ane used in id Software's Rage, where textures are quickly transferred into retentivity from the console's hard drive in small chunks - a process known every bit virtual texturing. This allows for a wider range of artwork to exist displayed on screen and less instances of texture repetition across the environment. The downside is that transitions between texture mip-maps (different quality assets) are noticeable during gameplay as the PS4'south HDD struggles to keep up.

The employ of an SSD makes a big difference here, dramatically lowering the amount of texture pop upwards we run into: while mip-map transitions aren't completely eliminated, artwork is streamed in much more quickly compared to the stock HDD, reducing the time taken for higher resolution assets to announced on screen. The hybrid SSHD holds up pretty well too, beating the regular HDDs in loading in loftier-quality artwork after restarting a stage mid-way through completing the course, although performance isn't quite as dependable equally the solid land drive. There are times when the results are merely mildly improved compared to the 7200rpm HDD.

Operation in this expanse is definitely much amend with the SSD; all the same, the results aren't quite as remarkable equally nosotros expected given the boost in read/write speeds, and especially access times - in that location are withal some texture streaming issues when restating a course afterward a crash, and when cycling through the various terrain options using the game'southward creator mode. This does suggest that streaming speed in Trials Fusion is limited past other factors than hard drive speed, and this is also something that translates over to many other games we used in our tests.

"Trials Fusion'south virtual texturing tech reveals a clear SSD advantage, and even the hybrid bulldoze hands in a operation that bests the traditional mechanical drives."

A range of tests here comparing Trials Fusion running on a standard high drive, compared with our faster 1TB model, the hybrid SSD/HDD and the total SSD.

Turning our attention to a range of different titles, nosotros noted that level of detail transitions and texture pop-upwardly remained identical beyond the likes of Call of Duty: Ghosts, Metal Gear Solid v: Ground Zeroes, and Lego The Hobbit regardless of which drive was installed in our PS4. Factoring out subtle variances in frame-rate and screen tear with regards to real-time rendering (in Call of Duty: Ghosts in particular), LOD transitions were a match, correct downwards to a single frame.

Overall, information technology appears that streaming speed and changes in asset quality are more often than not adamant by LOD set-up in these games rather than how much data the PS4's hard drive tin movement in comparison to SSDs and other fast storage media. There'southward besides the possibility that all of the master avails have already been loaded into the PS4'due south RAM in these titles, pregnant that the extra bandwidth and reduced access times offered upwards by the SSD and other drives over the stock PS4 HDD would have no affect with regards to how chop-chop textures and other objects are displayed on screen.

In terms of functioning, in our Thief Face-Off it appeared that some of the game'due south frame-rate drops and its noticeable judder could be attributed to streaming issues, with the engine not loading in assets apace enough for the game to procedure. This was hands visible in an early sequence in the game, where the player chases some other character across the rooftops at loftier speed - as new areas of the environment announced and camera angles alter, frames are dropped and smoothness is lost. However, despite various advantages in the speed at which data is handled over the stock PS4 HDD, we found no measurable improvements in functioning by switching to a faster storage device, suggesting that the problem instead stems from a CPU bottleneck. Similarly, the regular tearing and variances in frame-rate in Call of Duty: Ghosts under load remained unchanged when using an SSD. Other titles besides featured no significant changes in functioning when run from any of our upgrade drives, including the SSD: torn frames appeared almost at exactly the same moments in Trials Fusion in almost like-for-like scenes, for case.

"Games rely heavily on groundwork streaming, but our bulldoze upgrades showed little or no comeback hither."

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PS4 hard drives upgrade: Digital Foundry buying communication

PS4 Blu-ray games are seemingly identical to the digital releases, to the point where analysis of the disc itself reveals that the vast bulk of the data is independent in a unmarried .pkg file - the aforementioned data construction every bit downloads from the PlayStation Network. All PS4 titles are designed to install and run directly from the console's hard drive, and we anticipated that in that location could exist huge gains in switching to much faster storage solutions.

Withal, the reality is that while PS4 has much in common with the PC from an architectural standpoint, deejay IO operations are much closer to the PlayStation iii in exercise. That being the case, just like PS3, outside of sure titles the benefits aren't quite as dramatic as one might expect should you cull to install an SSD into your console. Loading and install times are shorter - considerably so in some cases - just this doesn't translate equally across all titles. Performance besides remains unchanged in all of the games we tried, with no articulate measurable increases in frame-rate or reductions in trigger-happy and judder at times when it appears that streaming could be ane of the main causes. In short, in that location'south no repeat of the scenario we saw terminal-gen where, for example, Skyrim ran much more than smoothly from an SSD.

There are some improvements, though: the process of booting upwardly the PS4, getting to the console's dashboard, and so loading up a game is noticeably quicker with an SSD installed in place of the stock hard drive, making organization operation feel that little bit more fluid throughout twenty-four hours-to-day utilize. This alone isn't really worth the trade-off in diminished storage capacity compared to the 500GB drive that comes with the machine though, and we would promise that developers keep to optimise with the stock 5400rpm bulldoze in mind, producing merely limited returns for faster hardware.

"Put price per gig at the caput of your HDD upgrade controlling, followed by access fourth dimension if you're looking for the best boost to loading times."

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A smaller improvement over the standard PS4 HDD is possible using faster mechanical drives, and so if you lot crave more storage and like the sound of faster loading times, a decent 1TB 7200rpm hard drive similar the Z7K1000 nosotros tested here provides a overnice depression-toll upgrade with plenty of space for your games, apps and other content - just don't wait massive increases in operation over the stock HDD across the board, and treat whatever faster performance every bit a bonus.

Of course, the fact that the PS4 is compatible with any 2.5-inch difficult drive (with a capacity of 160GB or over) ways that there are hundreds of options out there, and nosotros wish we could have tested more of them. Something worthy of serious idea is a 2TB 5400rpm drive: typically, the higher the storage, the more data is crammed onto the platters, and then while 5400rpm may not sound particularly fast, bandwidth does increase co-ordinate to data density. If we were to start this feature from scratch, nosotros would probably swap in one of these drives in favour of the hybrid SSHD - the variable success we got from the onboard caching suggests that the price premium isn't actually worth information technology. On the flipside, while 2TB two.5-inch 5400rpm drives are expensive, USB 3.0 "passport" variants are actually cheaper, and only a little pricier than the hybrid drive. At that place'south another bonus also: prise the drive out from the enclosure and non only do you have a PS4 upgrade, you also have a caddy in which to firm your old 500GB HDD. [UPDATE 28/viii/14 12:54pm - and that'south exactly what we've done here - cheque information technology out.]

Withal, the fact that the hybrid offers up some occasionally decent gains in performance does open up a tantalising proposition. The PS4 reserves an area of the hard bulldoze (believed to be on the exterior of the platter, where performance is best) for game developers to cache data. What if Seagate worked with Sony on a bespoke bulldoze upgrade that ensured that the SSD flash was used exclusively for the cache? Combine that with a 7200rpm drive and we could be looking at the best of both worlds - SSD speeds where it could really make a difference, combined with the cost-constructive level of storage that an SSD tin can't provide right now.

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Source: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-ps4-hard-drive-upgrade-guide

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