Topic: Hard Drive failure rate.

So my son PS4 Slim kept locking up. We to the console into a repair shop locally, who specialized in all console repairs. The tech guys new exactly what the problem was and showed me. The hard disk drive failure due to about 4 bad sectors, but me being a computer guys myself I brought the hard drive home with me and ran my own little test, and I came up with alot more bad sectors. So why is that? The system was alittle over a year old. I had computer hard drives with no failures last alot longer then this, up to 5 years or more, I even had laptops that took alot more abuse, and not a single issue with hard drives. So why after about a year the Playstation 4 / Toshiba MQ04ABF100

The tech guy said that this is very common issue with the PS4.
He suggest replacing the hard drive, in which we did.
He also suggest using the SSD SATA drive, and stated will improve the load time of the system and loading time of the games, but that they were out of stock on SSD.

I asked if, I can find one on my own could I also install a large SSD like a 2 or 4 terabyte drive, and he stated that I had to put the excite size drive in, or it wouldn't work. Any input on that?

If this is as common as he states, is Sony/PlayStation aware of this and are they offering any hard drive replacement?

Chances are the PS4 most likely shipped with a faulty drive, I've seen DOA drives in consoles and PC's, other times I've seen drives die within months or just over a year, sometimes luck of the draw and it sounds like that PS4 shipped with a dud of a drive.

In terms of being common perhaps for older PS4 drives, people have to remember once you launch a game the PS4 starts constantly writing data to the drive for the recording feature the PS4 has and if a drive is on its last legs it can result in a failure as constant read and write operations do affect drive longevity.

Once it's passed the standard year warranty I'm afraid that's pretty much it unless you purchased an extended warranty, and when you say the size I assumed you mean either capacity or physical size? as long as the drive is a 2.5inch form factor and no thicker than 9.5mm it will work perfectly fine.

When it comes to capacity anything up to 8TB is fine, I'm currently using a 2TB Samsung 860 EVO in my PS4 Pro, Digital Foundry recently equipped a PS4 Pro with a massive 8TB Samsung 870 QVO and that worked perfectly, make sure you have a USB to install a fresh copy of the PS4 OS though.

Hi, I just created an account to say I'm facing the same problem. My PS4 Slim shipped with a 1TB Toshiba MQ04ABF100 drive. It has a date code of November 2018 and is made in the Philippines.

A few months in, my PS4 started making loud beeping noises, but it worked normally. After a year, any new games I downloaded would take extremely long to load (old downloads worked fine). When this happened, the PS4 menus would also lag and freeze, even after closing the game and rebooting the console.

I suspected the slow loading and freezing was due to bad sectors, having experienced similar issues with my laptop in the past. But there's no way to confirm this on the PS4 itself. I tried the 'Rebuild database' method, but it didn't help.

So I bought an external enclosure for my PS4 hard drive, connected it to my PC and ran a SMART check. Sure enough, a 'Warning' came up and there were a ton of reallocated bad sectors (500+). The drive was only used for about 1,000 hours with about 250 power on/off cycles. Hard drives should last much, MUCH longer than that. I've got 5 or 6 other hard drives which passed the 10,000 hour mark with no major issues.

Hopefully Sony has stopped shipping their PS4s with this particular Toshiba hard drive. I've no doubt that many thousands more PS4 owners will face the same issue in the coming months, if they haven't already.