Seagate (ST2000LX001) FireCuda 2TB Solid State Hybrid Drive Performance SSHD – 2.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s Flash Accelerated for Gaming PC Laptop

Effortless installation on original PS4 system. From start to finish it took me 20 minutes to open the PS4, swap the drive, reboot to a USB stick and reformat the system. Took about another 4-6hrs to download all my PS+ game content and saves and re-install disc-based games... but now I have my entire library of disc and DLC games on this system and still ~800GB to spare (!!!).Regarding performance: I've done some soft tests of the Firecuda's loading delays and it definitely delivers on repeat loadings... Thus far, I've tried it with: Last of Us: Remaster, Titanfall 2, Uncharted 4, God of War 3 Remastered, and Wolfenstiein 2. In all cases, I've seen ~15-25% loading time improvement on the second load of the games and ~30-60% improvement on subsequent loads. Definitely shows the benefit of having a "small" SSD cache sitting the I/O pipeline with the main 2GB platter.It also has to be said that this thing is something of a work of engineering art, in and of itself. The hard drive uses a completely new method of doing data "layering" in the drive platter... This allows Seagate to cram terabytes of data in a platter topology that used to only be able to support gigabytes of data. Holding this little sliver of drive in my had next to my ~4yearold Western Digital 2TB external backup drive is hilarious... The WD drive is easily 10x the size of this device and actually made up of two 1TB drives.Having a Playstation+ account is critical to backing up you game-save data to the cloud for post-installation recovery. Alternatively, you can get yourself a 256-512GB external USB drive (I used a 128GB USB flash stick) and backup your system to that. The PS4's "Settings" section has all the tools you need for doing that part.All, and all, can't be happier with this upgrade. It was $65 well spent (got mine during a flash deal with a 15% off coupon code).

Exellent

I installed this drive in my PS4 Pro, and have been very happy with the performance and storage space. However, there is some confusion out there regarding performance, and if you don't understand how the drive works, you'll be disappointed.When you install the drive and begin firing up your games, you may be upset to discover that it's not at all faster than the 500 GB or 1 TB drive that came with your PS4 to begin with. Really, it's not one bit faster. You can time them and they load games and levels with seconds of one another. After seeing this, you may ask why you bothered paying a premium for the drive. After all, there are reliable, cheaper 2.5" 2TB drives on the market?The answer lies in how the drive works and how it uses the onboard 8 GB of faster flash space. The drive has onboard intelligence the monitors your activity. As you do things like repeatedly launch your current favorite game, the drive takes note of this and begins storing that game's or games' data in flash. As a result, subsequent loads become faster and faster, usually maxing out around the 5th load. By then, you'll see times dramatically faster, usually on par with SSDs. If you're a typical PS4 user, mostly sticking with one or two favorites of the moment, this drive will be immensely beneficial in terms of performance once you give it a week or two to learn your habits (yes, you can shortcut this by opening, quitting completely, and then reopening your favorite game a few times in a row).Now, if you're not a typical user, and find you regularly jump around to lots of different game and activities, then this drive probably isn't for you. Its performance gains rely on your having data you access with frequency. If that's not your behavior, it'll never be able to pin down on flash what you're likely to reach for next, instead having to load from the slow 5400rpm platter each time. In that case, a true SSD is your only hope for a noticeable improvement in speed, but then you're likely sacrificing storage space for speed. Used as intended, this drive offer the potential for both.