PS4 Hard drive replacement (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Tuesday, March 01, 2016, 19:13 (2985 days ago) @ stabbim

I thought the load times were more cpu bound than io

I dunno about the PS4 configuration as much, but in XBone land this is definitely not the case. Aside from 5400RPM drives being crap, it uses SATA II internally instead of SATA III. The result is that the USB 3.0 bus you can use to attach an external drive is actually faster than the internal bus, so if you put a 7200RPM drive in an enclosure and use that for an external storage drive, you wind up with MUCH better load times off of that than the internal drive.

I am not aware of any single spinning drive that can saturate SATA II. That's 375MB/sec. SSDs certainly can. I'm not seeing how you'd see any speedup on a hard drive by going external. 15k RPM disks don't even crack 250MB/sec.