Upgrading a PS4 hard drive
-Hey, guys, welcome back to Ask the Experts.
I'm Peter Brown from Gamespot.
-And I'm Jeff Bakalar from CNET.
-And together we're gonna answer your questions about nextgen consoles.
Today's question comes from Justin on Google Plus.
-I told you, there is at least one other guy on that thing.
-A CNET reader.
-What's so funny?
-He wants to know, can you install a solid state drive into the PlayStation 4
and place it to the hard drive that's inside?
-You absolutely can.
They are the same form factor.
-Yeah.
-And it's-- you know, it's super sleek.
Look at this thing.
-It's really easy.
We've got a little drive from Samsung here.
While we're talking, I'm gonna change it out, because it really doesn't take very long at all.
-You're gonna do it right here?
-Do it right now.
-All right.
-Simply--
-Whoa!
-I know.
It's crazy.
You're gonna pull this thing apart, and you just apply a little bit of pressure in its top lid, pop it off.
-These are expensive.
Way more expensive than standard [unk] hard drives.
So
you're gonna spend a lot of money, and be like-- what is this, 500 gigabytes?
-The one in here is a 500 gigabyte, 5400 rpm drive.
-Right.
So, if you wanted to even match that capacity, you're talking at least $300, $350.
-Almost the price of another PlayStation 4.
-So, not sure what kind of guy you are.
I wanna borrow money from--
-What kind of guy you are.
-you if you wanna-- if you wanna do something like that.
I would probably wait.
-Yeah.
-Wait till the future happens, where you can get a
terabyte SSD for $59.99.
I can't get over how light that is.
-It is very light.
-And just to let everyone know, you can't do this at all on an Xbox One.
It's not even an option.
Do I have to worry about the operating system?
Is it just gonna work right when I plug it in?
How does that work?
-So, what you actually do is after you physically install the hard drive, you go to Sony's website and you download the system updates and you copy that to a USB stick.
You have a new hard drive then.
Let me just put it back right now 'cause we're actually done.
-Ooh
it's that easy.
-Just like that.
-Just like that.
And you've got the file on the USB stick.
You hold down the power button for about 7 seconds, which boots the PlayStation forward to the safe mode.
-Right.
-The system is then gonna read the file off the stick, and from there you're going to reformat the hard drive, and-- but then you're done.
Then you're all set.
-All right.
Our next question is from Jake.
He wants to know if it's worth it in terms of performance increase when installing an SSD drive.
So, I know you did a little bit of scientific research on the results and the data and that sort of
stuff.
What did you find?
-So, when loading a game off the hard drive like Resogun, which is only a few hundred megabytes large, traditionally, on the standard hard drive, it took 20 seconds.
-Right.
-When we put in the new SSD, it only took about 10.
I think it was only between 10 and 11.
It's a pretty notable difference.
Other tests though, it wasn't that big of a gap.
Installing games, you would see maybe, you know, I think in the order of about 10% to 20% speed increase.
-Right.
-[unk] drive is not that fast.
-Right.
-So, both nextgen consoles have 500 gig hard drives, they're both
fit to 100 rpm.
They could be faster.
And unfortunately, only one is gonna let you upgrade to a faster drive.
So, yeah, the PlayStation 4 will let you upgrade.
You know, maybe drop that money at a 2 terabyte hard disk.
It's a lot cheaper versus the solid state drive.
You're probably gonna need the extra space because everything has to be installed in the system.
And while you can install a hard drive into Xbox One, you can on the external drive down the road.
-Right.
-There's options for each console, lots of things to consider.
As always, if you guys have any questions, let us know.
We'll be back for more answers to your questions.
I'm Peter Brown from GameSpot.
-And I'm Jeff Bakalar from CNET.
-Thanks for watching Ask the Experts.
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