Price, capacity, and speed are the three main things to think about when thinking about a storage upgrade for your PS4 or PS4 Pro, but there are other areas worth considering. That can make them occasionally tricky to find from mainstream retailers and on the second-hand market.
Hybrid drives are still manufactured, but the gap between hard disks and SSDs has narrowed, so there’s been less demand for these drives. Of course, using platter-based hardware means that no SSHD will achieve true SSD speeds, and the SSHD needs to ‘learn’ which files you use frequently – so it takes a little time for its performance boosts to become obvious. Over time, those are the ones that are stored on the flash chips. The reliance on a small amount of flash memory brings the cost down when compared to a full-fat SSD, and an SSHD can still deliver a performance boost when compared to a hard disk – because PCs, laptops and consoles spend lots of time accessing the same files.
They use a conventional platter-based system, just like a hard disk, but they’re augmented with a small board of SSD-style flash memory that stores your console’s most frequently-accessed data. Solid-state hybrid drives are a relatively new invention that bridges the gap between conventional hard disks and newer SSDs.
