How To: Swap Out the Stock PlayStation 4 Hard Drive for a Bigger & Faster One

How to Swap Out the Stock PlayStation 4 Hard Drive for a Bigger & Faster One

Bigger and faster. Two words that are pretty much always wanted no matter what the scenario is. The new PlayStation 4 has been out for only a few hours now and people are already looking for ways to one-up their friends and upgrade their already awesome systems.

The PS4 ships with a formidable 500GB hard drive, but if you want more storage or a faster drive, then you're going to need to swap it out for a bigger, faster one. And lucky for you, it's easier than ever now.

All you need is a Phillips screwdriver to take out the PlayStation decorated screw (and the screws on the hard drive holder), as well as your new hard drive. If you want more space and a little more pickup, without the absurd cost of a SSD, most people opt for a 1TB HDD, which you can find on Amazon or any number of tech players.

Peter Brown from Gamespot shows us how easy it is to replace the standard HDD (hard drive disk) with a SSD (solid state drive), but the process is the same no matter what drive you use.

Brown also shows you how to download the PS4 v1.5 firmware update from Sony onto a USB flash drive, and install the software on your new PS4 hard drive. For detailed instructions, see "How to Manually Update PS4 to Software 1.50 via USB Flash Drive" for help.

HDD vs. SDD

While the video above does show you that a solid state drive will most like be faster than a HDD, it forgets to mention that an SSD can cost a boatload of bucks, especially when you start talking terabytes.

The average user should be perfectly fine with the standard 500GB HDD that ships with the Sony PS4, but you can still upgrade to a larger HDD for much less than an equivalently sized SSD.