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Long loading times are one of our biggest issues with current-gen consoles. Games are getting bigger, more complex, with ever-increasing levels of details in art assets - but the fundamental basis of storage technology is unchanged since the Xbox 360/PS3 era. Solid-state storage drives are the future, and the question is, can PlayStation 4 Pro - with its brand-new, high bandwidth SATA 3 interface - finally take a good-sized chunk out of the extended pauses between gameplay that are often part and parcel of modern console gaming?We've been here before of course, having carried out extensive testing of the improvements an SSD makes to both Xbox One and PS4 gaming, and we still retain the backup archive we used previously to put various drives through their paces on Sony's platform. This offers up an interesting opportunity - the ability to compare the performance of the base PS4 500GB hard drive (an HGST model from a launch unit) with the 1TB equivalent in the Pro. And on top of that, we still have the OCZ Trion 100 SSD we used for our testing back then, meaning that the exact same data can be run on both PS4 consoles - the best we can hope for in SATA 2 vs SATA 3 head-to-head comparison.
OCZ's Trion drive does not represent the fastest technology on the market by any stretch of the imagination, but the point is that it doesn't need to be. We simply need to see appreciable gains in like-for-like testing to ascertain that the PS4 Pro's SATA 3 interface is capable of getting more from solid-state technology. The OCZ unit is certainly capable of delivering more. On the base PS4, the Trion 100 hosting The Witcher 3 loads up a Novigrad City save in a yawn-inducing 69.2 seconds (and this is still an improvement over the stock HDD's 92.5 seconds). The PC version installed on the OCZ drive loads up the same area - with ultra-level textures no less - in just 28.4 seconds. It's over twice as fast and the drive is clearly much more capable. The question is, can the PS4 Pro more fully utilise it?
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