Just read this at PC Perspective and it was quite interesting. I'm very tempted to upgrade:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/General-Tech/PlayStation-4-PS4-Blu-ray-and-Download-Storage-Performance-Boot-Times
Today I purchased a copy of Assassin's Creed IV from the PSN store (you're welcome Ubisoft) and got to testing. The process was the same: start the game then load the first save spot. Again, each test was run three times and the averages were reported. The PS4 was restarted between each run.
The top section of results is the same that was presented earlier - average load times for AC IV when the game is installed from the Blu-ray. The second set is new and includes average load times fro AC IV after the installation from the PlayStation Network; no disc was in the drive during testing.
First, the load times across the board were faster for PSN installs than they were for Blu-ray installs, which actually kind of boggles the mind. It seems obvious that read from the optical drive is taking some time even when Sony is installing the necessary content on the hard drive itself. Some kind of authentication is likely taking place in a pattern (or even continuously) to make sure the disc hasn't been removed. Even with the stock hard drive we see load times drop from 35 seconds to 28 seconds, a decrease of nearly 20%.
Both the SSHD and the SSD results decrease as well though: 20% and 14% respectively. Keep in mind that the SSHD load times are SLOWER for the first run but decrease in the 2nd and 3rd run as more of the data becomes cached.
