At CES 2015 we had a chance to check out Nyko’s Data Bank, a clever storage solution for the PlayStation 4. It's essentially a housing for a hard drive that sits on top of your PS4, and it's on track to becoming the cheapest way to push your PS4’s storage beyond a terabyte.
It's easy to upgrade your PS4's hard drive, but if you want to go big, it can be costly shelling out for a terabyte or larger drive. The PS4 takes a 2.5-inch hard drive meant for a laptop, but the Data Bank lets you use a cheaper 3.5-inch desktop sized drive.
We had a chance to go through the assembly process with the Data Bank, and it was just as easy as you might hope. It's a breeze to remove the top casing from the left side of the PS4 and click the Data Bank into place. The result is a secure fit, and it draws power from the console’s AC adapter, not a USB port. Nyko even includes a little screwdriver, so everything you need is right in the box. Everything except a hard drive, of course. That's sold separately, but if Nyko hit's the “$30-$40 price range” it quoted us, than the price difference between 2.5 and 3.5-inch hard drives will make this a worthy purchase.
The Data Bank also looks good. It fits the design scheme of the PS4, and only has one small cable running from the back. It's not exactly big enough to trip over, and should hide behind your system easily.
It felt solid and didn’t look half bad, but if there’s one catch with the Data Bank, it’s that it isn’t much help with solid-state drives. Most SSDs are 2.5-inches, so if you’re looking for the speed boost that comes flash storage, the Data Bank won’t be much help, unless you can score a deal on an obscure 3.5-inch SSD.
We also didn’t get a chance to actually play anything on a PS4 using Nyko’s Data Bank. We’d want to make sure it doesn’t effect the read and write speeds of the drive before giving it a full endorsement.
Ultimately, the best use case would be someone who already owns a large mechanical hard drive. If that’s the case, it would make complete sense to pickup Nyko’s accessory rather than spring for a whole new drive.