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Upgrade PS4 Drive using seagate internal or Toshiba harvested external?

miner_tjw

I’m looking to upgrade from 1 to 2 TB of internal drive space on my PS4 Slim. Without considering extracting it from the enclosure (not a problem done it plenty before), what would I be giving up in terms of quality by buying a far cheaper Toshiba external HDD and using that instead of buying a drive specifically marketed as an internal laptop drive? The prices are $70 vs $120 AUD for Toshiba and seagate respectively so I’m set on making the right decision for my PS4/ wallet’s sake. If there are enough problems with doing the Toshiba harvest method I will happily pay the premium.

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57 minutes ago, Schnoz said:

There are two major issues with harvesting ("shucking") external drives:

  1. In many 2.5" external drives, the USB connector is soldered onto the drive in place of the SATA port, preventing any other use case.
  2. External drives are the lowest bin. Hard drives, like processors, are binned based on their expected performance and reliability. The best drives go in datacenters (e.g. Ultrastar); good drives are marketed towards specific consumers (e.g. WD Black for performance-oriented storage, WD Green for cheaper storage with shakier reliability, WD Red for quiet, reliable NAS systems), and external drives are basically the HDD equivalent of what goes into a sausage. These are the drives that come with a laughably short warranty and fail not long afterwards, since they're too bad to be used even in the lowest bin of internal drives. I have had problems with almost every single 2.5" external HDD I've gotten my hands on.

That is incredibly interesting and I don’t know how else I would have learned that thank you. Definitely would have done my due diligence in making sure the drive wasn’t soldered to the board, but either way I might just drop the extra $50 to make sure it’s a quality drive marketed for internal use anyway. Thanks

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