PS4 SSD Upgrade

[Cold_Raven]

It does make a difference for FF14 on PS4. But it's a "nice to have" difference. Not a requirement by any means.

I always like the idea of full SSD rather than a hybrid. But price is a limitation if you want to put more games than just FF14 on your PS4

125GB SSD is close to $100 or so.
500GB SSD jumps right up to $500-$600.

If you go hybrid, though... you can go to 1TB for back down to $100 again.

At this point, I would suggest a hybrid if you were going to upgrade the PS4 HDD.

Also, don't forget about products like the Nyco Data Bank for PS4.
It's a little side product that allows you to connect full 3.5" size drives instead of only 2.5" drives. That makes things a lot easier when shopping around for a Hybrid drive.

The Nyco thing is nothing to worry about, too. It's simply a cable that's run into the PS4 that goes into a larger plastic-housing-thing that connects to the top of the PS4. Rather nice, actually.

[Kosmos992k]

Isn't the life expectency less and issues greater on hybrid drives for failure?

Technically yes, practically no.

Technically the SSD flash RAM used has a rated number of write cycles before it may fail. So, technically, you could create a failure condition by specifically rewriting a spot on the SSD sufficient times for it to actually fail. However, the number of cycles is generally very conservative, so generally the cells last much longer than rated. Also, the write cycle issue is well known to SSD makers so they use software in the drive to spread the load across the drive to minimize the number of times any given part of the SSD is written to. The more expensive the drive, the better the FLASH RAM used, and the better the firmware is at evening out the wear and tear on the memory cells.

I read some reviews recently tha addressed this topic and it seemed that the wear leveling in consumer SSDs is quite well done, and the quality of the actual memory is not terrible, so SSDs are no more prone to drive failure than a standard HDD.

One last thing. As far as I am aware, even if cells in the SSD start to fail after a long life, the use of error correction protocols and the wear leveling mechanism allows the drive to detect and avoid failed memory. So the drive continues to operate, but eventually it may reduce in performance/capacity.

This article from Toms Hardware should help you.

The key 'take away' is that for consumer use, the estimated time to failure based on wear and tear is measured between 18.7 and 62.6 years of use. And that was calculated on very conservative write cycle ratings, small drive sizes 80GB-160GB and 10GB of writes to the drive per day. Larger drives with better memory cells will last even longer. The upshot I got from this is that the drive is more likely to fail due to physical deterioration of components in the potential 2+ decades of life the drive will have, than it is due to memory cells wearing out.

Here is a link at Amazon for SSDs from 320GB to 999GB capacity, priced anything up to $200 ranked 4 stars and above by users. Definitely some nice devices for not bad money.

[FritoBandito]

If you do get one, don't skimp on the price. You get what you pay for.

[LDR]

ah yes the Nyco, wondering if anyone else knew about it

i use one since im a game hoarder who plays 12 things at once so constant uninstall/reinstall is murder

so with the nyco im now running a 3.5 4TB hybrid.

thing is the nyco does reccomend only going up to 2TB and i have to admit to some issues on occasion, sometimes it fails to read the HDD and other times it chucks me out the game claiming dirty disc or corrupted install even if i redo it so.

thing is, you can get 2.5 2TB hybrids so, unless you want to go higher its not overly worth the investment

[Valkyrie-Amber]

well i just put an ssd in my pc and its so much faster than the old style drives, super fast map loads and stuff.

im sure it will be great on a ps4 and even a ps3 to kill load times somewhat.

[Maero]

Ahh cool, thanks for that info Kessler. Should i decide to upgrade again down the road i may look into trying one.