I wish I waited. I'd have bitched less about no games, thrown down less money on crap games that were ports I haven't picked up on last gen yet except for Lords of the Failure which was next gen exclusive garbage, and had an extra 500gb PS4.

Bloodborne was great but it could have waited.

Did you read what you're replying to? My answer is:

It looks great on paper but trying to persuade people who already use an external drive to upgrade to a 1tb version of the console is much harder than persuading people to upgrade to a 1tb version of a console with NO external support. Sony aren't stupid.

If you have USB 3.0 than its not slow at all. Plus you can have 3tb or 4tb for alot cheaper then 1 tb SSD.  1TB ssd i can get in nz  5 3tb external HDD lol. 1tb these days is way to small. Alot of people liek myself don't like to delete and reinstall , just to play game hence why we choose HDD as you jsut plug and play and you can access to yoru entire library whenever you want. no waiting  no need to reinstall.

There are tons of way to play large games directly from disc, but they are suboptimals and would allow for less graphical prowess and create actual loading times. (Remember real loading times ?)

i did and still dont see how its counterproductive  . in fact alot of gamers who have ps4  just liek myself are waiting for the nyko accessory which allows external HDD support.  Therefore they wont need to persuade anyoen to use it . Just giving an external HDD support will provide gamers with more options as they can choose to upgrade their internall hdd or use the external hdd. In that sony is stupid for not providing external HDD support.

To me a storage device is useless if I die of old age before I can fill it back it up.  Ever timed how long it takes to fill or empty 3 TB of data over 10s of thousands of files?  It won't even saturate USB 2.0 at 25 MB/sec let alone USB 3.0 or SATA 6G. That is a realm exclusive to SSD.  

Sure I have to reinstall something from time to time but when it takes me 30 seconds to restore a partition backup instead of 30+ mins who cares.

Coping data from hard drive to hard drive reminds of recording tape to tape in an old cassette deck.

Sure you can hit 100 MB/sec if you have 1 giant 3 TB file but that isn't the real world, random access is, and you'll be hard pressed to saturate a USB 2.0 link with a mechanical drives sustained random access throughput.  HDDS suck.  It's time they just go away.  

Reel to reel, 8 track, cassette, VHS, floppies, HDDs, all the same 5 decade old "technology" of laying down magnetic tracks and only one of them refuses to die.

We just need better storage devices.  Even the 1-2 GB/sec of non SATA limited NAND Flash SSDs is still far from the almost 300 GB/sec of GDDR5 but its a still way better than 0.1 GB/sec or god forbid 10s of kilobytes per second that hard drives drop to under heavy random access loads.

I know gobs of storage is a relatively new thing to console gamers and it doesn't quite have the same impact in a console (yet) with the way images are packed for sequential access and unpacking but in the PC world HDDs are dinosaurs and no longer belong in anything.

The only place a HDD is acceptable is in an enterprise SAN where you have thousands of them aggregated together with 100s of GB of cache RAM and then the performance is decent.  But not for single drive systems.

My last desktop was a 2.5 GB/sec SSD RAID on a home LAN built on 10 gigabit Infiniband.  Forgive me if I'm an I/O snob.  But this kilobytes and megabytes per second nonsense has to stop.  And it won't stop as long as we continue to believe that passing slow moving magnetic material under a moving loop of wire is still a valid data storage technique in the 21st century all because that particular dated method allows people to hoard data they will probably never even access again.

Should have had this at launch.

This is nonsense, PS4's Blu-Ray drive is 3 times faster than that of the PS3. PS4's Blu-Ray can reach a speed of over 200 Mbps. That is actually sufficient for most of the data. Much faster than a external USB 2.0 hard drive for example, though a little slower than a USB 3.0 hard drive that can be used to install games for Xbox One.(might be interesting to test a few slower external hard drives to see what minimum speed is needed to run games without problems).

It's just easier for developers to simply copy all that data to the hard drive instead of having to optimize for reading data of the disc.

Sure SSD is faster and its good for games or in pc , good for fast boot of the OS. HOwever you have to bare in mind the cost of 1tb SSD is not worth it. I for one can buy a 980 cheaper then 1tb SSD  in  nz or i can buy 3 XO or 3 ps4 for the price.   In terms of  HDD i have mentioned i can get 5 3tb hard drives. i rather have quantity then slightly faster  load times .   waiting for few more seconds  wont harm what you have to do in a single day. Therefore its not practical to wast such a large amount of money to get a faster load times , unless you have money to burn.  I got a top end gaming pc and still use a normal standard HDD. In fact i have 3.5 tb worth of it and i can easily fill that up in  a year or two. For gaming this generation , 3tb is easily. i have one for XO and i am close to 40% of it . Thats not true, on my XO i have access to all my gaems thanks to that method and its nice knwoign that its there aond i dont have to reload them. After a hard theys work , all i want to do is turn my machine on , click the game i have and play. i am not spedn the only time i have , makign sure i have enough space to play it , think of what game i have to delete and then wait for it to reinstall. its just a hassle and an unecessary time waster.  It may take 1 min bbut you haev to decide which gaems to delete and if you keep deleting  and reinstall then that 30 secs or 1 min will acccumlate , wheres if you spend that oen 20 min to install a game, you dont hav eot ever waste tiem or think about what to delete. Just one click and you are in. simple as that

1TB consoles - $400 - 500GB console - $350 maybe?