On the Xbox On you can restrict all data to a single drive.
Or you can set a drive as a primary drive and when that is full, the console automagically starts using the next drive and will thus report all storage as a single storage amount. - Great if you have a ton of Downloads in Que set to download over night and you are almost at a drives max limit.

Plus unplugging and moving the data to another console is a seamless plug-and-play experience, with no confuffing about with settings and other garbage.

Plus Microsoft allows you to have saves and such on the external drive, Sony does not.

Microsoft also has double the HDD size support of Sony. (16 Terabytes vs Sony's 8 Terabytes.)
And Microsoft will allow for up to 3x external Hard Drives. (Not sure how many Sony will let you have.)

Sata 2 vs USB 3.0 is irrellevent for transfer rates.
Mechanical drives generally won't use all of the bandwidth on either bus, unless it's a burst-transfer, which might last a second or so on the rare occasion.

Latency is actually better on Sata 2, so should help when it comes to lots of random reads and writes and Sata generally requires less CPU time.

I'm shocked this wasn't always the case. Seems like something that both should have had day one or very close to day one.

I have a 1.5TB so I'm alright for now. But I'll definitely get a 2TB external probably at the end of the year. That will do me for the gen.

I can't really see most of these being issues for people, for instance a 16tb costs $400+ and is kind of a moot point if you can't partition that drive for other storage uses as well (haven't heard of anyone taking up 16tb of storage on their console yet but I'm sure they exist).

Saves aren't an issue because you can actually back them up to a external drive. Mine are stored on my thumb drive for instance. They just don't support edternal HDD yet but this is all in beta so who knows.

It does sound like the way account information can be moved on the external drive for x1 seems elegant though. I hope it's like that on PS

It's all thanks to my recent thread.
http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=222079&page=1
You're welcome.

I just hope this allows us to take our games from one console to another. That will help a lot when upgrading to more advanced PS4 models and eventually PS5. It would also make it a lot easier to show of PSVR.

good things will happen to people who buy a small (500gb or so) solid state use it as internal, speed up that operating system and stuff and then put all the games on the external.

Might do this myself lol

I got a 4TB external on my Xbox One S. It was a simple process. I hope PS4 has a simple process.

I cant imagine it it being anything but simple.