You'll see a decrease in load times, that's about all.

The only reason I switched to an SSD when mine failed was to ensure it wouldn't fail again, no moving parts in an SSD. Mine is only 250gb, I play all my games off of a 2tb external hdd. I get the benefit of the PS4 booting faster and the dashboard running smoother.

I used to move games between the external and ssd, but the only improvement was load times, didn't improve stutter or anything, so wasn't worth it.

I would not advocate a 250GB internal unless you plan to use an external for game storage. The PS4 had an annoying habit of creating a copy of a game when it downloads a patch, it then applies the patch and deletes the original copy.

Doesn't sound like a big deal, but RDR2 at 112GB would need another 112GB of free space and then whatever size the patch is added on top, so you won't have enough free space to download the patch.

I knew that going in though, I went SSD for the longevity and planned to play from my external HDD anyway.

 

For how long there is till the PS5 I don't think it's worth the hassle of adding any drives right now. Copying the game to apply a patch seems totally unnecessary a way to do it and although faster load times would be nice obviously I'm gonna save my cash for that new TV and PS5.

 

True, not worth it now. My HDD failed at the beginning of lockdown and I didn't want to wait to order online, the only thing I could get my hands on locally was an SSD from Argos.

I always assumed the PS4 system software was stored on a chip on the motherboard, but it isn't. It's actually on your hard drive, so when you install a new internal, you need to download the latest firmware onto a USB and insert that from safe mode to load up the new hard drive.

The reason they did it that way was to avoid you having to redownload the entire game, should the patch get corrupted when being applied. So it was kind of good thinking, but causes big issues when people don't have a 1-200GB of free space.

 

Yeah I wouldn't have waited either, needs must and all that.
Well it makes sense to do it that way but I guess they didn't think it all the way through and that coupled with game size increases and people wanting to have many huge games on their HDD it became a problem for people.