The rest of this season would be so bloodthirsty cutting at each other ' s alliances one by one <| sep |> Yup , thinking of it like congested traffic is a good comparison . If you ' re able to divert half the traffic to another road , both benefit . So , since I guess I have my information a bit confused , if in Scorpio they decided to upgrade the drive to 7200 rpm , but kept it Sata ii , would there be a performance gain ? From what you are saying I would assume so . Yup . The max transfer rate of a 7200 RPM drive is still well below SATA II max . And then one step further , the elite console with it ' s sshd , would it also benefit from an external then ? Yup . The same rules apply . Note also that based on the numbers at , even data transferred from the NAND part of the SSHD is still well below the max of SATAII at ~ 190 MBs . It ' s really only when you have a full SSD in play do things become interesting with respect to the actual interfaces used . Even then , SSD over USB any USB isn ' t going to be fantastic because USB filesystems are notoriously bad due to how the protocol handles them BOT . UASP effectively SCSI over USB was designed to fix that but the console doesn ' t support it . Compared to traditional USB 3 . 0 BOT , UASP performs up to 70 % faster read speeds and 40 % faster write speeds at peak rates , just with the change in protocol used .