The Best PS4 Hard Drive

Expand your storage and improve your load times with this hard drive in your PlayStation 4. 
You probably know that you can change out the hard drive in your PlayStation 4 for a larger one. It’s a good thing, too, since just a few AAA game installations can have that 500GB drive feeling cramped. It’s easy to do: all you need is a Phillips head screwdriver, a USB flash drive loaded with the latest PS4 firmware, and your new hard drive.
But which hard drive should you choose? And does it matter if you get a mechanical hard drive, solid-state/hard-disk hybrid drive, or solid-state drive? Don’t worry—we’ve done the research and the testing, and we’ve got the answer.

The Best PS4 Hard Drive

To get the best mix of performance and price, buy a mechanical drive for your PS4. Our recommendation for a 1TB drive is the HGST Travelstar 7K1000. It will double the space in your PS4, will slightly reduce the load times in some games, and is competitively priced at just $65 when compared with other 2.5-inch (laptop-sized) drives of the same capacity. You can sometimes even get it for about the same price as a 1TB 5400RPM HDD if you catch it on sale.

If you want more space, you can grab a 2TB 5400RPM drive like the Samsung ST2000LM003; the mostly small speed difference between a 5400RPM and a 7200RPM drive makes sacrificing extra seconds of your time to gain more space acceptable.

An SSD In Your PS4? Not Really Worth The Money

But while you can justify buying a 1TB 7200RPM drive for its modest gains in speed, you can't say the same for an SSD or even a hybrid drive.

	Standard Drive (5400RPM)	HGST 7K1000 (7200 RPM)	WD Blue SSHD	Seagate Laptop SSHD	Crucial BX100 SSD	Samsung EVO 850 SSD
Capacity	500GB	1TB	1TB	1TB	500GB	512GB
Batman: Arkham Knight (Load Time)	00:50	00:48	01:39	01:38	00:48	00:46
GTA V (Initial install)	01:07	01:03	01:03	01:10	01:03	01:01
GTA V (Full install)	38:44	37:21	37:47	36:07	37:11	36:31
GTA V (Load time)	01:55	01:20	01:25	01:37	01:10	01:06
Bloodborne (Load time)	00:32	00:32	00:32	00:32	00:30	00:29
Bloodborne (Continue game)	00:12	00:11	00:12	00:11	00:10	00:10

As you can see from the chart above, opting for a hybrid drive (SSHD) or a solid-state drive (SSD) doesn’t make much sense. In our tests, the Travelstar 7K1000 offered performance on par with the two hybrid SSHDs we tried (and in one case, did much better). It also posted speeds only slightly worse than SSDs that cost a lot more. Sure, the Samsung EVO 850 Pro can load GTA V a whole fourteen seconds faster than the Travelstar, but you’re not getting enough of a performance bump to justify the extra dough. That's particularly true if you want to increase your PS4's storage space—it's already an extra $165 more than the Travelstar to get a 500GB SSD; if you want a 1TB SSD, that'll set you back almost $400 more.
So the bottom line is that if you happen to have a suitably large SSD lying around, don’t ignore it in favor of buying a 7K1000—it’ll work just fine. However, buying one specifically for use in your PS4 is overkill. A 7200RPM mechanical drive does the job practically just as well for a lot less cash.