Sony went for the swappable internal HDD solution rather than support for external HDD. It more or less amounts to the same thing. Only difference is one solution is more convenient (external HDD) and they other looks nicer (no external device plugged in). I think external HDD support is better, but I'm fine with swapping out my HDD for a 2TB HDD some time in the future. Though easy enough to delete installed games esp disc based games to manage thing and incur no additional expense at all.

Not quite. The bitrate for Sata III is 6GB/s while the bitrate for USB 3.0 is 5GB/s. You won't notice much (if any) difference in real life performance for the most part. Both are insanely fast. PS4 actually uses Sata II from what I can tell, which is actually much slower than USB 3.0.

I tought it was still USB 2.0

Power cosumption comes to my mind too, and it would also make piracy easier (Easier than to remove the internal HDD every time you want to add a game)

Actually, the peak bandwidth for SATA 2.5 (PS4 internal HDD conector) is around 300MB/s. Peak bandwidth for USB 3.0 is 625MB/s. The bottle neck in both cases is that unless using an SSD you will be hard pressed to find any HDD that can even reach 300MB/s speeds. Not even 10,000rpm drives. So technically, external drives, especially if using n external SSD can theoretically give you higher transfer speeds than whatever drive you put internally.

OT:

I think sony has said external HDD is something they can put in, and I really can't see anyting stopping them from putting it in, I don't even feel there are security holes they need to worry about that can't be easily controlled. I just feel its not at the top of their priority list tho (I honestly can't even imagine what is at this point considerring how many things the PS4 still can't do) and that wiiU and XB1 had to support that feature outta necessity.

A 1TB SSHDD will set you back under $105 now though, not much I know considering if you install 18 50GB games or less its full lol. But if you wait till around november, I am pretty sure you could find 2TB 2.5" HDDs for under $100.

It doesn´t? I hope they add it soon for the fans though. The moment X1 allowed it, I plugged my 1Tb into it. When my brother gets an X1, I can take my entire game Collection to his house.

Nah, the PS4 supports USB 3.0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4

Also, power consumption shouldn't be a big problem, since drives are supported anyway right now but only for copying screenshots and videos. Piracy is probably the main reason, but both the Wii U and Xbox One have it and have run into no problems, so I don't see where it could go wrong as long as they keep patching and potentially exploitable code.

Wait? Recently I moved some of my gameplayfootage to an USB HDD that was formatted in exFAT. Of course you mean you can't move/install games on your HDD and why should they. That will only cause irregularities in experiences (especially online) and it's not that of a big deal to install a 2TB in your PS4

Yeah, the bitrate is an accurate representation of overall bandwith, so I just included that. Should be the same since bit rate is measured in bits, not bytes, so the conversion should work out.

But yeah, completely agree. No mechanically spinning drive is going to max out the bandwith for the most part, SSDs might, but those are much more expensive overall (for now).

Media copying for game footage and screenshots is supported, but not game installations, which is the big problem.

The Xbox One and Wii U support external game installation and there has been no problems. The HDD max bandwith for USB 3.0 is faster than the internal, so it isn't a limiting factor at all, and I don't see how faster loading times would give anyone an advantage in an online map, where the data is usually loaded before the match?

Yh I know the conversion works out, was just giving a simpler explanation for the person you were explaining it too :).

But come on!!! Prices of SSDs has to come down a lot faster than they are now, I just can't justify spending as much or more for a 1TB SSD as I did for the PS4 that I want to put it in. Ah well, maybe with the PS4 we get SATAe and SSDs as standard.