Going for a mass storage drive offers up the ability to divorce yourself from the meagre 500GB offered up the standard PS4, while using an SSD gives us our best chance of reducing the sometimes embarrassingly long loading times we're seeing on the current generation of consoles. These two options represent what we consider to be the two prime use-case scenarios for PlayStation 4's external hard drive support.
Would moving up to a larger drive size improve or degrade our loading times? Is there any benefit at all to using an SSD and would utilising the USB interface detract from its performance? We purchased a 4TB Seagate STEA4000400 'passport'-style hard drive costing around £120 and stacked it up against a 480GB SSD inserted into a USB enclosure. We decided to try out two different storage options - one concentrating on capacity, the other on speed. Boosting available hard drive space is now easy and virtually any kind of storage can be attached - but the question is, what's the best way to use this feature? With the recent arrival of system software 4.5, PlayStation 4 finally possesses a 'must have' feature that has proved invaluable on Xbox One - full support for plug-in external storage, hooked up via USB.
