Now that industry reveal-a-thon E3 is all over and done with, and the dust from the multitude of amazing announcements has finally settled, it's time to think a little more practically. With Shenmue 3, a Final Fantasy VII Remaster and Kingdom Hearts III all on the horizon, the time for upgrading to the newer consoles is quickly approaching, with many games now skipping the older Playstation 3 and Xbox 360s and heading straight for the Playstation 4 and Xbox One instead. More games is all well and good, but with an increase in technical specs comes a whole new problem for the new consoles...
...Storage space. With games now insisting on installing themselves on to both the Xbox One and Playstation 4, and routinely taking up 50GB+ of space at a time, the number of games you can have in regular rotation is comparatively small - nine or ten, maybe a dozen if you're lucky, and then you'll have to start playing storage space Tetris. However, one of the less exciting, but arguably just as important announcements to come out of last week's E3 is that you'll soon be able to pick up a console with twice the storage space - a Playstation 4 with a 1TB hard drive built in.
The self-confessed 'best place to play' is now even bigger.
An improvement over the standard edition, which comes with a measly 500GB hard drive as standard, the new 'Playstation 4 Ultimate Player 1TB Edition' is a rather long-winded way of saying 'this bad boy has a bigger hard drive'. Perfect for newcomers who plan on picking up more than a handful of games, the new version of the console is also ten percent lighter and uses eight percent less energy - making it a slightly more efficient model too. Hitting Europe and the UK next month, on the 15th July, there's currently no word on pricing as of yet - and, in amongst roughly a million Batman: Arkham Knight special edition consoles on both GAME and Amazon, we couldn't find any provisional listings for the bundle either. Given that the original 500GB model goes for under £300 these days, we can't imagine - or at least hope - that the bigger hard drive version won't be too much more expensive.
Whether the new console will be prohibitively expensive or not, Playstation 4 owners do have another option if they're struggling for space. As you may or may not be aware of is that, much like the Playstation 3 before it, you can swap out the built-in Playstation 4 hard drive for a bigger one, with a little bit of technical know-how, a Phillips head screwdriver and a USB stick (and of course, a hard drive, 2.5 inch). However, exact sizes of third party hard drives the Playstation 4 supports are a bit of an uncharted territory at the moment, with Sony's official how to guide neglecting to tell you just how big you can go - although we did find some nutters on the internet who've managed to attach 6TB drives in with success, a size which is currently only available in 3.5inch drives, so requires all kinds of extension cables and hard drive 'enclosures' to get it to work. For a more fuss free option, you can simply crack open your Playstation 4 and swap out the existing drive for a 2TB, 2.5 inch laptop drive of the kinds Samsung sell on Amazon for about £80.
The new, bigger Playstation 4, which comes with 1TB of internal storage will hit stores on the 15th July. No price is given at the moment, but given that you could mod your Playstation 4 to have the same space for about £50, we're hoping it won't be more than about £350 - although time will tell, we suppose. If bigger consoles are the kind of thing you get excited about, why not check out the trailer below:
