It will just be a matter of time when people start to decide on upgrading their PS4 Pro with solid-state drives. Just like what happened before with the good old original PS4. One of the speedbumps for the modern consoles today is still loading time. That fire is being fed with wood in the form of ever-increasing file sizes per game.
The demand for quality is exponentially increasing and so does the file size requirement. Unfortunately, the technology for data transfer hasn't improved that much since the previous gen consoles - Xbox 360 and PS3 in case you already forgot. Why is this so, by the way? Probably, there's not enough consumer demand to research for faster storage processing. After all, we're 'just' gaming.
With the current demand for faster file processing that I've been rambling about above, the question stands. Will the PS4 Pro perform better and make gamers satisfied when it is crammed with an SSD? It does have a SATA 3 interface right? Being aware that the games will be bigger in size, waiting for games to load will become an issue sooner or later. We didn't invest in a beast of a device just to spend more time waiting for their wonderful games to load.
I've bumped into a post at Eurogamer.net talking about the technicalities of upgrading your PS4 Pro with an SSD and the most important part - questioning if it's really worth it. In summary, their first test concluded that the putting a Trion 100 SSD on both PS4 and PS4 Pro will have the latter only average of about 2 seconds faster loading time.
The post also suspects that even though the PS4 Pro is utilizing SATA 3, there should be a bottleneck somewhere that needs further investigation if desired to be pinpointed. With that statement, it is clear that the hard drive used isn't the only factor in how long the game levels would load. Eurogamer states that data transfer cap is needed to ensure other essential process i.e. recording, downloading, installing, etc.
"The chances are that game loading speeds are still limited by a set cap on data transfer throughput. It ensures that other background processes - like installing, downloading, and the recording features - can all run at once on whatever mechanical hard drive Sony can acquire in bulk volume for its latest production run."
An unintended test result
While doing several tests, they found out the PS4 Pro's 1TB stock drive loads way faster than the 500GB variant. For instance, in Witcher 3, Novigrad City loads at 78 seconds on the 1TB compared to 92 seconds with the 500GB. They then tested other scenarios with it and observed that it is generally the result. This just proves that SSD upgrades are not necessarily the answer to faster loading times. Though a lot of tests need to be done to prove that higher capacity can also contribute for PS4 pro's data transfer performance.
If you'd ask me, I'd stick with stock. For one, it's much less of a hassle. Second, I don't really care if I spend a few more seconds waiting for a game to load up. Anyway, there's always the PC with SSD option if I wanted a game to load way faster than the PS4 Pro.
