Seagate Game Drive for PlayStation 1TB Review

TweakTown's Rating: 86%

The Bottom Line

Seagate's Game Drive for PlayStation is definitely worth a look if you are in the market for a drive upgrade in your console.

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After our review of the Game Drive for Xbox, we were contacted and asked to take a look at a similar solution Seagate launched for the blue team and with that it didn't take long for us to have this very drive in the lab.

The Game Drive for PlayStation is the latest solution from Seagate offering 1TB of capacity to users of the PS3 and PS4. With these console's storage easily accessible, this solution comes in a 2.5" form factor and hosts a SATA III connection. At the heart of this solution is the Laptop SSHD featuring 8GB of NAND flash and Seagate's adaptive memory technology, allowing the drive to cache the most accessed bits of data and store them in NAND for quick retrieval.

Compatibility of the Game Drive for PlayStation extends to PS3 and PS4 consoles. MSRP for this solution sits at $94.99 for 1TB and comes with a one-year warranty.

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Packaging for the Game Drive has the capacity and interface listed at the top right.

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Over on the back, we have marketing information on the Game Drive.

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Our first look at the Game Drive reveals this solution is a rather popular drive, the Laptop SSHD.

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The top right on this drive shows the capacity at 1000GB.

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Above, you can see the SATA power and data connections are correctly placed for drive trays and sleds.

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To test the Game Drive, I decided to put this solution on PCMark 8 gaming traces. As you can see in this first chart, the Game Drive offered nearly double the write performance of the standard hard drive.

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World of Warcraft again showed a solid performance increase in this workload. The Game Drive reached 102 MB/s of write bandwidth with the standard hard drive at 77 MB/s and SSD at 394 MB/s.

The Game Drive for PlayStation is an excellent solution that certainly deserves a look if you are in the market for a drive upgrade in your PS3 or PS4. The drive, being a Laptop SSHD, is a proven solution, and has been used in many gaming notebook and Ultrabook over the years.

Even with SSDs now climbing over 1TB in capacity, the cheapest single drive 1TB solution is still over three times the cost of the Game Drive, and while this solution won't get you SSD-level performance in all cases, with its unique caching algorithms, the Game Drive will indeed add to your PlayStation experience.

The build quality is solid with the Game Drive as I had no issues in testing this solution and performance was quite good within our gaming traces in PCMark 8. Battlefield, while being slightly dated at this point, did serve up double the performance over a standard hard drive, while WoW showed a 50% increase in performance between the Game Drive and a standard 2TB HDD.

Overall, the read performance alone is enough to have me choosing this solution over the stock drive in the PlayStation, and if you are one that is on a budget, this drive is a definite cure for your PlayStation storage performance woes.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Z97-A - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Cooler: Corsair H100i GTX - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Memory: Patriot Viper 3 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 1600 - Buy from Amazon
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Storage: Intel 730 480GB - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Case: Corsair Obsidian 750D - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower 750W - Buy from Amazon / Read our review
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 - Buy from Amazon