OK, so lets get one thing straight. Crucial sent me a budget 480gb BX500 SSD and told me to do something with it of which a regular user could do and show its advantages. I did think of doing the regular thing of doing a quick demo on why SSD's are beneficial for older laptops but lets face it - we all know that. Instead, I saw that old, forgotten PS4 in the corner of my lounge as a worthy target for my SSD rampage.

My glorious PS4 is from the dark ages. It is literally one of the first PS4's out of production bought back near the end of 2013. It has an issue of a failing hard drive. I remember in the past I had replaced this with a 1tb drive I had laying around from an old laptop (of which I upgraded to a SSD) but even this couldn't save it. With Fallout 76 coming out shortly I knew I would be using the PS4 again so needed to do something. I don't really use the PS4 enough to justify a replacement and so I thought I'd get a few extra years life out of it.

First things first - this will wipe everything! Follow at your own risk!

The first step to supercharging your PS4 is to ensure your glorious save games are backed up somewhere safe unless if you want to go through Fallout 4 all over again. This is pretty simple. There is a handy guide Here of how to do just this. I opted in to uploading all my save games to the PSN Cloud which was surprisingly a quick and painless process. On Gigabit UFB this whole process took me 5mins to upload 2gb worth of save game data. You can also opt in to send your games to any USB drive you have hanging around however you'll need to format this as exFAT first using the PS4.

Next thing is to prepare a USB drive with the system firmware on it. Head over to this page and follow the directions to create a USB flash drive. Basically, after you're done it'll look something like this:

Sony make it incredibly easy to upgrade the drive in your PS4. Off to the left of your PS4 is that strange looking glossy plastic which is likely scratched up by now. Just slide it off by sliding it to the left. Once you're in, the screw you need to unscrew is near the front left of the PS4's hard drive. You'll know you have the right screw since this one is "very special" and stands out with its Playstation symbols printed on it:

Now, Carpet is not the recommended place to do this. I had no real choice (advantages of living in a small home). You could place some newspaper down too but too but I didn't have anything handy. Once you've pulled out the drive caddy just simply unscrew the old drive and put the new one in:

Screw it back in, put the plastic back on and set it up again. Ensure you plug in that flash drive you prepared earlier. It'll do a boot, and fail (as no operating system is installed).

Simply follow the directions on screen here to reinstall the system software - it guides you through the whole thing. Once you've done this (it'll take about 10mins) then you're all set again. Get into installing your games again and go hard.

I've found that game downloads are substantially faster (my PS4 was downloading at about 600Mbit over Ethernet) and the whole system is way more snappy. Launching one of my favourite games, Crash Bandicoot, used to take upwards of 5mins (potentially due to the failing hard drive) but now it takes less than a minute. Loading screens I've found are almost non-existent and for less than $150 I've gotten basically a new PS4.

While 480gb is less space than the 1tb I used to have I found I was barely using 1/4 of the space on my old drive due to me only being a casual gamer. With the rise of fast internet it really doesn't take long to download a game again from the cloud if you were to ever have to clear some space off. This upgrade has not only saved me a tonne of money but has bought new life into my old PS4.

So, with that said - if you've got an older "current gen" console it could be worth upgrading that to a SSD also if you want quick load times. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 use slow 5200rpm 2.5" hard drives which are actually terribly slow. You'll notice a huge difference.

Thanks Crucial for making decent SSD's at a budget price point within reach for most people!