Hardware questions

[Thad]

If I want some more hard drive space on my PS4, what's my best option?

Internal or USB -- if I swap out the internal drive, does that mean I have to re-download all my games? Is there any significant advantage using an internal SATA drive over a USB3 one, besides saving space and a USB port?

What kind of drive -- am I going to get significantly better load times on an SSD than an HDD? For that matter am I going to get significantly better load times on a 7200RPM HDD than a 5400RPM? How about hybrid drives; are those a good option for splitting the difference between speed and cost-per-byte?

I've done a bit of reading up on this but most sites seem like they're trying to sell me on something that's entirely overkill for my needs. I kinda feel like a regular-ass sub-$100 USB HDD should be plenty, but if there's a reason it's not, let me know.

[Thad]

Looking at benchmarks:

Per Eurogamer, it looks like the same drive runs slightly faster on a SATA connection than USB, but not significantly faster.

And per IGN and Tom's Hardware, SSDs and hybrids perform substantially faster than spinning rust, but for the most part SSDs don't perform substantially faster than hybrids.

So it seems like probably the overall best option here is probably an external hybrid drive.

Except I'm not sure that's a thing? At a glance, all the hybrids I can find are internal drives. So I guess I might need to buy one of those and an enclosure.

[Thad]

Okay, so a FireCuda Gaming SSHD 2TB in a Nekteck Aluminum USB C Hard Drive Enclosure works, but you'll need to supply your own USB cable and the PS4 is really fucking finicky about the cable.

The Nekteck enclosure comes with a USB C-to-C cable. The PS4 doesn't have any USB-C ports (or at least the Slim doesn't; I can't speak to other models) so you'll need to supply a USB A-to-C cable yourself. And my PS4 kept giving me vague bullshit errors about how the hard drive was incompatible; I suspected the cable was the issue but I had to try like six of them before I finally got one that worked.

[Thad]

Adding: The specific error message I got, that turned out to be due to a bad USB cable, was this:

Cannot format this USB storage device as extended storage. A USB storage device that meets the following conditions must be used: (CE-41902-6)

• USB 3.0 or later
• 250 GB minimum, 8 TB maximum capacity
• Directly connected to the PS4

If you do a DDG search for this error message, the first result is a page on a website called ps4storage.com, which I believe was written by an AI that has learned sarcasm. It suggests trying a different cable as a last resort. After trying a different PS4.