I would like to replace the internal HDD of my PS4 with another one at least 2TB.
Can someone suggest one compatible with a good price. There is so much offer out there and am confused by all different prices, SMR, CMR and so on.
Thank you in advance
With that Amazon SSD drive you've linked, will that easily fit and replace the existing PS4 stock drive?
Yes, it just shouldn't exceed 9.5mm, this drive is 7mm, so I don't see any reason why it wouldn't fit/replace the PS4 stock drive. You won't get much speed benefit out of it though as benchmarks have shown. It is faster, but the PS4 has other I/O bottlenecks preventing it from really taking full advantage of the drive. The cool thing is, if you ever upgrade to a PS5, you can put that drive in to a USB3 enclosure and the PS5 will play your PS4 games off the drive. So it's not a waste to get one of these even if you have a PS4 and intend to upgrade eventually.
Hey do you know if all this advice goes the same for Xbox One X HDD replacement too?
I replaced the stock HDD in my One X with a Crucial MX500. Boot and load times aren’t anything groundbreaking, only marginally better than what you get with the stock drive.
Replacing the drive is no easy feat, certainly not as easy as it is on the PS4.
A 7mm tall SSD (or HDD) would fit just fine.
Thank you, I am more inclined toward a HDD than a SSD for budget reasons. They make it a bit tricky to understand if the driver is SMR or CMR.
I can't comment on the other manufacturers, but to the best of my knowledge ALL of Seagate's 2.5 inch drives are SMR-based these days. The cost of SSD drives have gone down to the point where it might not make sense to produce a high-capacity 2.5 inch drive that doesn't use SMR as it would be priced close enough to the SSD that people would just get that instead. And just so you know, I wasn't the one that down-voted your response, but I also think you might be better off getting an SSD instead.
I just replaced my old 1 TB.
I was doubting if I should use Seagate 2TB Barracuda SATA but it worked perfectly $136
Thanks buddy
Stay away from Shingled Magnetic Recording… those drives are mainly intended for archival purposes, not things like gaming. So what it does is: when it writes data, it initially writes it to the fast area of the drive, but then in the background it moves the data around onto slower-to-write areas of the drive. So it's constantly shifting data around in the background (while you're trying to play games). So to give you an example, let's say you just installed a game, it will install fine, but then once installed it will move all that data in the background WHILE you're presumably trying to play the game, resulting in slow disk access times.
So you want a CMR drive, other than that, you can pick up pretty much any drive. In general, the faster the RPM's of the drive, the faster the access times, so get the fastest drive you can. If you don't mind spending a bit more though, a 2TB SSD drive isn't that expensive these days. For example, you can get one of these from Amazon for $229 and it delivers Tuesday: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07QRSR5M4/
You're never going to get the full speed of an SSD due to other limitations in the PS4, but it will be the fastest drive you can get for the PS4. You also need to check the height of the drive as the PS4 can only take drives up to a certain height… I think the limit was 9.5mm, so make sure you don't exceed that. The 2TB SSD I linked to is 7mm and should fit okay.
The only other thing I can tell you is this, when downloading the firmware to install on the new drive, make sure you get the full version of the firmware, not the upgrade firmware which is smaller and not intended for a new drive installation.