

Still, as a drive the ESD220C is probably the one you want, if you’ve got the readies: while at 240GB it can’t rival the capacities of the HDDs below, it’s a tiny, tiny device that weighs nothing at all – perfect for packing in your game-sack.īuy the Transcend ESD220C SSD here from .uk Transcend’s ESD220C SSD, for example, has a write speed of 400MB/s – which, while relatively quick, meant there was no major difference using it on the PS4 over the other drives, bar a few seconds shaved off loading times. What’s the outcome? Across all the drives we tested, the speed difference was marginal at best – likely because each had to channel through the USB 3.0 interface in order to talk to the PS4.

The difference, though, is that USB controllers can slow things down a lot – far more noticeably than any differences in drive speed itself. In theory, USB 3.0 has a top transfer speed of 5Gbps, where SATA III (used by most internal hard drives) offers 6Gbps, which isn’t a huge gulf. Here, though, the quandry of USB 3.0 comes into play.

Using a tiny solid-state drive as your PS4’s external expansion solution seems the obvious choice: not only are the drives properly pocketable, they’re also, in theory, much faster than traditional hard drives.
