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PS4 HDD speed test thread (HDD/SSHD/SSD/STD)

M

Metfanant

Member
Very interested in seeing more results from those with 7200rpm 1tb drives...this is the route I've been planning on going...
 
Q

Quexex

Banned
I've got a couple of weeks to wait but it seems the SSHD is the one to go for. However does playroom get lost if you put in a new drive?
 
J

jony_m

Member
Metfanant said:
Very interested in seeing more results from those with 7200rpm 1tb drives...this is the route I've been planning on going...
Click to expand...

Using a HGST (Hitachi) 7k1000 1TB 7200rpm drive here, excellent speeds, no slowdowns in UI even while installing from disc/downloading multiple items.

Happy with the game loading times and fast boot from sleep, I would recommend it at this point for the price.

PS: I didn't go for the SSHD because of the small FLASH cache (8GB) and 5400rpm for everything else. I think the video always-recording functionality will interfere with that caching and thus use the 5400rpm speeds for most data - I preferred the 7200rpm drive.
 
T

Tux

Member
DBT85 said:
Those of you fortunate enough to have a PS4 in your possession, would it be possible for you to take a few moments to detail some of the following information for us.
uMj3wGd.png
Click to expand...

When I get mine, I'll be replacing the HDD with a Seagate Momentus XL 750GB SSHD. The 7200 RPM version.

The Seagate 1TB SSHD version you have listed in the chart is 5400RPM.
 
T

Tux

Member
underwaterthing said:
Has anyone spotted a 1.5TB 7200rpm HDD that will fit? Thinking that's the way I want to go now but I'd like as much space as I can get
Click to expand...

I think there's one on newegg that's 2TB also. But I have to check. The Travelsar is the best option I've found as far as HDD, 7200 that will fit the PS4 (must be 9.5mm height).

Beware of the 15mm thickness HDDs. They won't fit in the PS3 or PS4.
 
V

Vizzeh

Banned
Where is Eurogamer + Gamespot with the video Speed comparisons :p

I believe the fastest 7200RPM drive in 2,5" is 1TB
 
T

Tux

Member
underwaterthing said:
That's a 5400rpm. I want a 1.5-2TB 7200rpm one if any such exists
Click to expand...

DBT85 said:
uMj3wGd.png
Click to expand...

I just checked my NewEgg Wish List…nope. No 1.5 or 2.0GB 7200 that will fit the PS4. Only the 15mm ones.

The HGST Travel Star is your best bet in HDD 7200 RPM 1TB drive. The 1TB SSHD Seagate listed in the chart might be a bit faster some reads. But I'm suspecting that the reports of it beating other HDDs are other 5400RPM drives. :/

The SSHD that I'm getting is not easy to find in 750GB. And it's $150. :(


Once we all move to SSD we won't have to worry about this "RPM/hybrid" matrix. lol Just SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s pipe) and the flash speeds.
 
R

Rizzilio

Neo Member
Killing_Joke said:
GAF i figured out the standby mystery!! When you are downloading or installing in the background the system goes to a higher standby mode. Therefore the system boots and shuts off faster. If you have nothing going on in the background at all there's a good chance you'll get a longer load. I just tested this this and got the 3 sec load.
Click to expand...

Just wanted to give you props on this one Killing, as I took a look at my PS4 wattage this morning and it was at 21.17, booted it up and it took roughly 20 seconds.

I made sure last night that there were no downloads/installations/apps running when I went to bed, however the PS4 did upload some of my saves about 10 minutes after I went to bed, so I think that kept it at the higher power standby until that was done.

Basically what I think we can take away from this is that if you either have a download going, an installation going, or an upload to sony's cloud storage you will get those almost instant boots. After the PS4 takes care of that and goes into the lower power state, then you get those 20-25 second boots.

Now I just need to find a game that I don't want to play but can just delete and install over and over for when I want instant boots on the weekend :)
 
V

Vizzeh

Banned
Tux said:
I just checked my NewEgg Wish List…nope. No 1.5 or 2.0GB 7200 that will fit the PS4. Only the 15mm ones.

The HGST Travel Star is your best bet in HDD 7200 RPM 1TB drive. The 1TB SSHD Seagate listed in the chart might be a bit faster some reads. But I'm suspecting that the reports of it beating other HDDs are other 5400RPM drives. :/

The SSHD that I'm getting is not easy to find in 750GB. And it's $150. :(


Once we all move to SSD we won't have to worry about this "RPM/hybrid" matrix. lol Just SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s pipe) and the flash speeds.
Click to expand...

Is the time taken to produce these drives the expensive factor or the parts to do it?

I wish they would just drop the prices and phase out physical drives, like Electronics do, phase out the old...
 
M

MercuryLS

Banned
I'm waiting for the 2tb 5400RPM drive (from Samsung/Seagate). The speeds are fast enough, I want as much storage as possible so I don't have to clean out the fridge often.

That drive is already released to OEMs I believe, when can the general public buy it?
 
D

DBT85

Member
ReturnOfTheRAT said:
HGST 7200rpm. Sorry, It's not a Seagate as I mentioned beforehand. I do have a Seagate SSHD but haven't had a chance to test that. Here are the results for the HGST.

Start up after being turned off: 23.7 seconds
From Standby mode to dashboard: 5.67 seconds
Click to expand...

I look forward to more details including the specific model number. Thanks for helping out!

FrankNitty said:
Here are some horrible videos lol on the standby boot listen for the beep. Will post more info tomorrow and better videos. Running seagate 1tb sshd

Standby boot

Boot to resogun
Click to expand...

Could you just let me know what HDD you are using please.

Latest scores are as follows.

mMgiwxO.png



For anyone wishing to submit further scores. PLEASE try and follow the template below. By all means also link a video in. Also I NEED your HDD model!

HDD Installed (model # & size):
Cost of HDD:
Boot from cold to menu time:
Boot from standby to menu time:
Game boot times (from XMB to menu/start, Disk/Digital):
 
J

joesiv

Member
Vashetti said:
Hopefully by the PS5 SSDs will be dirt cheap and we'll never have to deal with mechanical drives again.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately in 6-8 years games won't be 50gbs but be 500gb in size so the cheap 2tb ssds won't help, the 10tb ssds will still be $500+

Maybe
 
S

Skeff

Member
joesiv said:
Unfortunately in 6-8 years games won't be 50gbs but be 500gb in size so the cheap 2tb ssds won't help, the 10tb ssds will still be $500+

Maybe
Click to expand...

Games will stay below 50gb for the vast majority, because that's the size of a bluray disc, the disc drives in PS4/XB1 are standard bluray drives and can only read 2 layer bluays so disc sizes are never going to surpass 50gb in the mainstream, even 360 games this generation were mainly 1 disc with only big games like GTA pushing onto 2 discs.
 
K

Killing_Joke

Member
Rizzilio said:
Just wanted to give you props on this one Killing, as I took a look at my PS4 wattage this morning and it was at 21.17, booted it up and it took roughly 20 seconds.

I made sure last night that there were no downloads/installations/apps running when I went to bed, however the PS4 did upload some of my saves about 10 minutes after I went to bed, so I think that kept it at the higher power standby until that was done.

Basically what I think we can take away from this is that if you either have a download going, an installation going, or an upload to sony's cloud storage you will get those almost instant boots. After the PS4 takes care of that and goes into the lower power state, then you get those 20-25 second boots.

Now I just need to find a game that I don't want to play but can just delete and install over and over for when I want instant boots on the weekend :)
Click to expand...

Awesome now i can finally stop banging my head against the wall. lol

The new PSN server is A LOT more stealthy than the PS3. There's a good chance our PS4's are downloading/uploading shit and we wouldn't even know. With the PS3 it took a full boot to download/install which is why for the most part people timed it during the night. PS4 literally does it constantly either by standby or during a game. I had a 2 hour sessions with Knack and had 2 games installed and 2 updates installed with 0 slowdown. The new background chip is a godsend.
 
th4tguy

th4tguy

Member
Killing_Joke said:
Awesome now i can finally stop banging my head against the wall. lol

The new PSN server is A LOT more stealthy than the PS3. There's a good chance our PS4's are downloading/uploading shit and we wouldn't even know. With the PS3 it took a full boot to download/install which is why for the most part people timed it during the night. PS4 literally does it constantly either by standby or during a game. I had a 2 hour sessions with Knack and had 2 games installed and 2 updates installed with 0 slowdown. The new background chip is a godsend.
Click to expand...

The stealthy comment is the truth. I got all of my games digitally this time around. I have about 7 games on my system. Went to bed thinking it would all be done downloading when I got up. I got up and they looked to be done. Nothing in the downloads list even. Started playing killzone single player and after a few hours of that, I wanted to try multiplayer only to find that it was downloading still in the background. Same with COD multiplayer and AC. I'm fine with this as it let me play the games before everything was downloaded but I wish they would show up in the download list instead of me having to stumble upon it either in game or through the information option of the app.
 
X

XblogPSN

Neo Member
cormack12 said:
It does matter if the underlying OS supports TRIM. Not necessarily for the performance we measure in terms of loading games etc. but for efficiency and endurance. SSD drives do come with their own sort of garbage collection.

Think of it this way. When you delete a file on a normal HDD, the OS just marks the sectors as 'free'. It can overwrite this sector when it wants with no penalties (maybe fragmentation further down the road).

Contrast that to an SSD. When you 'delete' a file, it remains in the NAND because of the way SSD's balance erase/write cycles. It only knows it's invalid when the OS tries to overwrite the same address/sector in the future. When the OS tries to write here again, then the SSD will write the new data and live data to a new cell, and erase the dirty cell - effectively creating a penalty. Meanwhile because the OS has no way to communicate with the controller, this data will still be moved round as part of the hardware garbage collection until it is overwritten, creating unnecessary writes and erases.

Although the marketing would have you believe that fragmentation doesn't occur on SSD in the traditional sense, a dirty NAND is just as detrimental and to be honest is a form of fragmentation in itself.

Taking the example above, TRIM support at the software level allows commands to be sent to the controller after the soft ;delete' has taken place. This optimises the erase/write cycle at this point, creating new empty clean NAND to avoid the penalties to endurance and performance described above.

Having said all this, how 95% of people use SSD in consoles, it won't really matter until years 4-5 anyway in my opinion. Then you might see performance degradation.

FreeBSD 9.0 (core of Orbis) does support TRIM and Sony may patch it in later as a system update depending on how sales for SSD's go.

SSHD seem to be a far safer bet, but even then the NAND allowance isn't huge per platter (currently 500GB at the spec we look at). As always with tech, it's usually a case of trade off at some point.
Click to expand...

Many thanks for the explanation! it's clear! so if you have illimited budget :), what would you choose to replace PS4 HDD ? Thanks!
 
V

Vizzeh

Banned
Skeff said:
Games will stay below 50gb for the vast majority, because that's the size of a bluray disc, the disc drives in PS4/XB1 are standard bluray drives and can only read 2 layer bluays so disc sizes are never going to surpass 50gb in the mainstream, even 360 games this generation were mainly 1 disc with only big games like GTA pushing onto 2 discs.
Click to expand...

They "could" do an install disc, which would make use of the mandatory install, then stream the rest from the second disk. I wonder what the evolution of data on the disk was like for the PS3, launch titles starting at XGB and bigger games XGB. Basically do they typically grow, especially now that PS4 can use larger textures? With most Launch games starting between 35-50GB atm
 
T

TheExodu5

Banned
cormack12 said:
It does matter if the underlying OS supports TRIM. Not necessarily for the performance we measure in terms of loading games etc. but for efficiency and endurance. SSD drives do come with their own sort of garbage collection.

Think of it this way. When you delete a file on a normal HDD, the OS just marks the sectors as 'free'. It can overwrite this sector when it wants with no penalties (maybe fragmentation further down the road).

Contrast that to an SSD. When you 'delete' a file, it remains in the NAND because of the way SSD's balance erase/write cycles. It only knows it's invalid when the OS tries to overwrite the same address/sector in the future. When the OS tries to write here again, then the SSD will write the new data and live data to a new cell, and erase the dirty cell - effectively creating a penalty. Meanwhile because the OS has no way to communicate with the controller, this data will still be moved round as part of the hardware garbage collection until it is overwritten, creating unnecessary writes and erases.

Although the marketing would have you believe that fragmentation doesn't occur on SSD in the traditional sense, a dirty NAND is just as detrimental and to be honest is a form of fragmentation in itself.

Taking the example above, TRIM support at the software level allows commands to be sent to the controller after the soft ;delete' has taken place. This optimises the erase/write cycle at this point, creating new empty clean NAND to avoid the penalties to endurance and performance described above.

Having said all this, how 95% of people use SSD in consoles, it won't really matter until years 4-5 anyway in my opinion. Then you might see performance degradation.

FreeBSD 9.0 (core of Orbis) does support TRIM and Sony may patch it in later as a system update depending on how sales for SSD's go.

SSHD seem to be a far safer bet, but even then the NAND allowance isn't huge per platter (currently 500GB at the spec we look at). As always with tech, it's usually a case of trade off at some point.
Click to expand...

Modern SSDs have their own garbage collection now. TRIM isn't really as important as it used to be.
 
V

Vizzeh

Banned
rawd said:
My 840 Pro is the 512gb version btw if you want to add that... I'll work on getting Knack KZ load times.
Click to expand...

Are you glad you went for the 512 or wish you went for the 1TB?

Iv no doubt the SSD you got will saturate the controller, likely going to be one of the best out there, Im considering ordering myself, but dropping another £400 on it, hmm
 
cormack12

cormack12

Gold Member
TheExodu5 said:
Modern SSDs have their own garbage collection now. TRIM isn't really as important as it used to be.
Click to expand...

I've just explained exactly why TRIM compliments garbage collection. Without TRIM, garbage collection will still move around deleted data until it's overwritten at a hardware level. Moving dead data has a penalty to the cells. Therefore endurance will be affected - I agree that performance isn't a big factor until aging sets in..

TRIM allows the OS to communicate with the controller when soft deletes are done.

Example: You delete a 1GB file from the PS4, maybe an update from block A. TRIM is not enabled in FreeBSD so it can't communicate with the GC. A few hours later GC is working itself through the drive as more writes are made and discovers it needs to move blocks. Blocks A-D are moved elsewhere. Without a TRIM command the drive still has to maintain the data. Block A will not be considered 'removed' until the OS overwrites the same block later.

With TRIM, when the delete command is sent a TRIM command is sent as well notifying the drive that the block can be purged/dropped at the next GC interval. This leads to quicker GC and lower erase/write cycles (hopefully - real world metrics will vary on drive use)

If your talking about performance gains, then TRIM will not give you that until later in the drive life when you have a real dirty NAND or almost full NAND.

In terms of how useful it would be for a console, TRIM would be excellent because at the sizes indicated we'll all be deleting patch data/update data and game data at some stage, freeing it up from an OS level but not block level until an overwrite occurs.

With SSHD the cycles will be faster, but the algorithms also work with how consoles are used. For instance, everyone has 3/4 games that will stay on their drive as they are mainstays in the catalogue/multiplayer gaming. So the drive will see BF4 and FIFA data pages in use a lot. This data will be stepped up into the SSHD portion of the drive. Therefore increasing the performance of the games/data you use the most - i.e. game data you're probably not going to delete.

Is an SSD a wrong choice? No, certainly not. You're still going to get massive increases in performance but probably not relative to the $$$. This TRIM/GC argument isn't really going to affect anyone until quite late into the console lifecycle anyway - and even then it will vary according to usage/digital games etc.
 
R

Redmoon

Member
Will be posting results using my older 256G SSD, since my new one's order got cancelled :/ Hopefully will add that one in later on.

HDD Installed (model # & size): Samsung 840 Pro 256GB
Cost of HDD: ~$250 ( dont exactly remember, got it to long ago)
Boot from cold to menu time: 17
Boot from standby to menu time: 16
Boot from standby to menu time (while downloading Resogun in the background): 2
Game boot times (from XMB to menu/start, Disk/Digital): Resogun/Digital - 10
 
V

Vizzeh

Banned
Redmoon said:
Will be posting results using my older 256G SSD, since my new one's order got cancelled :/ Hopefully will add that one in later on.

HDD Installed (model # & size): Samsung 840 Pro 256GB
Cost of HDD: ~$250 ( dont exactly remember, got it to long ago)
Boot from cold to menu time: 17
Boot from standby to menu time: Tba
Game boot times (from XMB to menu/start, Disk/Digital): Tba
Click to expand...

How much space do you have left with JUST the OS on it ?
 
R

robo

Member
How much faster is the downloading v ps3? Anyone have any speed benchmarks. I have 120mb fibre and on ps3 can do 1gb every 5 minutes from the store. How much faster is the ps4 store. Thx
 
K

kdoll08

Member
Gillian Seed said:
Ok guys I don't care as much about a huge speed upgrade, but I just want the most reliable upgrade at a price point around 100 bucks. I am reading bad things about Seagate being unreliable. I think I have narrowed it down to these 2:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152291

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236561

Which one should I get?
Click to expand...

Neither. Get this one. It's has more room, is 1tb and has 32mb cache

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145875
 
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