Both Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One come with pedestrian-like mechanical drives that take significantly more time to boot up or install a game. The companies chose slower drives to keep the costs down. But you can make your PlayStation 4 or Xbox One console faster by using a solid-state drive. Just to give you an example, it takes 29 minutes to install NBA 2K14 on PS4 with a hard drive. But the install time comes down to just 8 minutes and 9 seconds if you use an SSD instead of the hard drive.
Follow Sony’s instruction to replace PlayStation 4’s internal drive
Though PS4 doesn’t support external hard drives, we have known for a long time that it allows users to swap out the hard drive. You can follow Sony’s official instructions to back up your data, and access the hard drive bay. Simply access the drive bay, remove the hard drive, and replace it with a faster SSD. You could also put in a larger mechanical hard drive if you like.
On PlayStation 4, you can install only one drive, so make sure that you are buying a fairly large SSD. Also, the PS4 requires a drive to be 9.5mm or thinner in size, 2.5-inch internal drive, and use the SATA specifications. In tests, an SSD performed even better than a hybrid drive, which is a regular hard drive with a small amount of SSD added.
Xbox One supports external hard drives
Unlike Sony, Microsoft doesn’t let its users open the Xbox One and replace its internal drive. But it supports external hard drives. Simply connect an external SSD that meets USB 3.0 specification with your Xbox One. Now you can install games on this external drive. Chris Hoffman of HowToGeek says games would load significantly faster from a speedy external SSD compared to the internal mechanical drive.
Before buying the external SSD, make sure that it is at least 256GB in size and supports USB 3.0 to install games to it. The Xbox One comes with three USB 3.0 ports, allowing you to plug in up to three external drives.
