I’ve been researching 2.5" SSHD’s vs 7200rpm HDD’s and haven’t found anything for gaming consoles. I’m looking at replacing the SATAII 5400rpm HDD in my PS4 next week and was debating on which drive would work best. The two drives that I’ve got it narrowed down to are the Seagate 1tb SSHD/5400rpm/64mb cache (Model# Model: ST1000LM014) or the WD Black 750gb HDD/7200rpm/16mb cache (Model# WD7500BPKX)? Just wanting to get some opinions on which would be best and why. Also, if someone thinks that another drive would work better just let me know. I’m not looking at SSD’s right now because I’m looking to increase space without spending more than I did for the console. Thanks
Check into performance of that Seagate before you buy. I recently purchased one for a new laptop and was very dissappointed with random access times, it was considerably lower than you’d expect for a 5400RPM drive. I don’t know if I got a defective unit or not, I didn’t bother looking into it but I am running the WD Black 750 instead and far outperforms the Seagate in random access numbers.
I guess it depends on the profile of use in the console, I would imagine that you boot infrequently and load lots of data for games. An SSHD won’t help you with that. That SSHD has something like 8GB SSD in it, typically it’s enough to cache windows boot stuff and greatly improve boot times, but anything not in that cache will load slower (SSHD 5400RPM compared to a performance 7200RPM drive). So I think you’re get more benefit from a fast HDD and good bulk data load times, rather than an SSHD with really fast load times of 8GB data and reduced performance of everything else on the disk.
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I was wondering about the performance because I’ve heard mixed reviews on them. How much warmer does your drive run being a 7200rpm? Also, is it any noisier? I just don’t want to shorten the life of my system for an increase in speed. I’ve also found a Momentus XT SSHD that’s 4gb ssd and 7200rpm but I’ve heard that the Black drives typically perform as well as anything else. I know that the Momentus drives are discontinued but I’ve found some new ones online.
It’s kind of hard to compare temps without actually comparing them, but right now with the laptop not doing much the disk is at 35, it can get to 55+ doing a disk surface scan, but the laptop itself runs very hot and has extraordinarily poor cooling (especially around the HDD). When I say the laptop runs hot, I mean it runs at 104 degrees under load, and it’s a magnesium case so the whole thing heats up (It’s a Dell).
I’ve found typically a 7200 rpm 3.5 drive runs at 6-7 degrees hotter than a green drive under similar conditions and workloads.
The Momentus XT might be worth a look, they were plagued with various firmware faults etc. but I expect there should be something reasonably stable now though. They did pull the line and replace with a slower spindle speed model, which makes me suspicious a lot of their problems were thermal and they had no choice 
TBH after I bought that other Seagate SSHD and it performed so poorly I’d just stick to either SSD’s or straight 7200RPM HDD’s.
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That’s a good point on the Momentus. I think I might just stick with the stock drive or go with a WD Black. I’ve heard mixed reviews on people swapping out there console hd’s but with the file sizes that the companies are reaching anymore, I think that an increase in speed will be worth the upgrade.
