
First up we have the Hitachi Z7K1000 - a 7200rpm 1TB drive that is effectively a larger, faster version of the stock unit. We decided to narrow our choices down to three quite particular upgrades. So, what are the drives we've chosen to test? After all, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, available on the market, and a fair few in our office collection too. "Each component of the PlayStation 4 is a clear generational leap over its PS3 equivalent - except for the hard drive." Could we see similar improvements on PS4, with the added bonus of more space to store our games and media? On PS3, swapping to a better drive could massively improve the cohesiveness of the game's presentation. Meanwhile, the recent release of RedLynx's Trials Fusion allows us to put virtual texturing technology - also seen in id software's Rage - to the test. For example, as we mentioned in our Face-Off, Square-Enix's Thief suffers from some poor frame-pacing issues which appear to be related to streaming new assets from the hard drive.
PLAYSTATION EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE SOFTWARE
It's a topic we've been thinking about for some time, but only now do we really have a wide enough range of software to test in order to come up with some tangible results worthy of a buyer's guide. Would we see faster boot times? A more responsive front-end? Would games load quicker? Would intrusive streaming issues and pop-in be resolved? But more than that, we wanted to see what happens when the standard hard drive is replaced with better, faster technology.

On the one hand, with game installs often ranging from 20-50GB, it's clear that the PS4's stock hard drive can fill up pretty quickly - so we're interested in getting the most cost-efficient upgrade.
PLAYSTATION EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE UPGRADE
Thankfully, this is the one part of the hardware that users are free to upgrade themselves - so that's exactly what we did. The PS4's 500GB 5400rpm hard drive isn't just of a similar spec to the PS3 Super Slim's - on our launch model at least, it's actually the exact same unit.

Looking at individual components of the PlayStation 4, Sony's brand-new hardware is anything from 6x to 16x more powerful than its predecessor - but there's one area that has remained completely unchanged. UPDATE: 25/8/14 12:54pm - Looking for a cheap 2TB upgrade for your PlayStation 4? A couple of months after publishing our original guide to upgrading your PS4 hard drive, we put together this this piece on the best value 2TB upgrade path we could find, comparing its performance to the replacement drives we discuss in-depth below.
