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Wonder why they used HDDs and not a CompactFlash card - CF under the hood is IDE in a different form factor, there's passive adapters to IDE, and you can get them new up to 256GB. Or you go with CFast, a SATA adapter or just a straight SATA SSD and then a SATA to IDE adapter. Far more durable than any HDD will ever be.

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They're fine for data storage, but CF card controllers for large capacity(16GB and above) had issues with severe stuttering and performance issues in random reads/writes causing OS to become unresponsive for seconds at a time if not BSoDing - no, they were not instantaneous for everything just by being flash based. There were also some problems in some SSDs that the SSDs sometimes take much longer than HDDs to complete its own firmware bootup process, so much so that BIOS might consider the disk broken. Could be those reasons.

Or it could be just that HDDs are still more economical than SSDs. About ~2x cheaper for 2.5" 1TB as of now.

Most CF cards are marked as "removable drive" by firmware and can't be changed. I'm not sure PS will accept that.

Industrial CF cards that don't do that are very expensive.

The Transcend consumer cards are/were generally 'hybrids' - they would work in IDE mode if connected to such an interface.

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