Upgrade Hard Drive or use Portable Hard Drive

Yep, the internal drive would be formatted with the PS3's format method allowing files over 4gb. The portable drive will have to be formatted FAT32, which won't support files over 4gb.

Probably the reason the portables are cheaper is they use 3.5" drives instead of the 2.5" drives needed to go internal.

NewEgg has a 500gb 2.5" laptop drive for $69. How cheap do you need?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822152289

You can't download games or demos to a portable hd, either. Unless that's changed, and no one told me.

Generally External HD's are 3.5in and Portable HD's are 2.5in. A long ways back I bought a 250GB WD Portable. With a little tenderness and a pocket knife I was able to pry open the case and remove the drive from the enclosure. Then I swapped it with the original 60Gb from the PS3 and put the 60 in the enclosure. Both have worked great going on 3 years with the 250 getting filled and cleared several time. One thing to look out for is the height dimension on the drive, the PS3 can handle 9.5mm which is what most are.

Besides game data and demos, anything else can be run from an external?

I'm wondering if a 120GB SSD + 320GB ext hd would be a better combo than a 500GB 7200RPM int hd.

Unless you like to buy movies from PSN Store, they must be stored in the internal hard drive to be able to play.

If you store non-DRM movies, store on external hard drive as long each movie file is smaller than 4GB.

I store anything that doesn't require internal PS3 hard drive on external hard drive. It's also far easier and faster to backup external hard drive and sharable with other PS3/X360/PC.

And using as external hard drive, you don't loose another 10-12% of disk space reserved by PS3 OS. If you have 500+GB, that's quite a bit disk space not usable as internal PS3 hard drive.

I'm trying to figure out about SSDs and Trim and garbage collection. I guess some frives have it built in to the firmware and some rely on Win7. I'm not sure what this means for the PS3.

For external USB drive, I'll suggest non-SSD because of the limitation with USB 2.0.

Someone who uses SSD can better answer. I have compared 5400 and 7200 RPM as internal PS3 drive. The only time I can really tell 7200 RPM improve the performance is downloading something in the background while installing a game. Other than that very minimal difference.

Each external USB storage is only good for one account save game files. What that means is when the save game files are stored on external storage, PS3 can't tell the owner account that created them. But the actual account owner that create the game save is retained in the file.

I play games on multiple PSN accounts and have to keep separate USB storages for each owner.

If I can squeeze down to < 110GB, I might get a OCZ Agility 3 SSD for internal stuff, and then move everything else to the 320GB 5400 RPM that was inside. More juggling of games and installs, but faster loading.

How much faster does SSD improve in loading on PS3 compared to 5400 RPM hard drive?

Unless the game installs 100% to the internal drive, the major slowdown in loading will be the BD. Since most PS3 games today install 2-3GB, when you start the game, it will first load from the disc first, then partly from the hard drive (depending on the game). So, in the end, how much total savings if switched to SSD?

Another catch is if you buy the download version, the games are often around 6-12GB. Now, SSD capacity becomes the problem because PS3 doesn't allow individual game backup. So, having to redownload the game becomes the bottleneck unless you use proxy server to cache the download files locally.

I'm assuming the part that is installed on the HD is the important data it needs to load for play. The reason they do installs is to avoid BD access. I normally don't buy DD versions of full games, so that should not be the biggest issue (I have Warhawk, ACiI and Wipeout HD). I can't install everything and leave it and should not leave demos installed. That being said 110GB (maybe less) is not much these days.





Edit: I went with the Momentus XT 500GB, got it for under $100.

From the video clip benchmark, it will be interesting comparing SSD to 7200 RPM hard drive. Another option is have external 10K RPM with large cache hard drive connected with longer SATA cable to PS3 as internal hard drive. You can span multiple hard drives together at lower cost for high speed and large capacity Raid.

Even games that do full installation still have access some files from BD for security and often the cutscenes.

The only way to 100% avoid any BD access is mod the PS3 with CFW because it copies the entire disc image to the hard drive. And then additional hard drive space when the game has to do standard install. Huge disk space requirement.

I still wish Sony will go X360 style on hard drive installation. No hard drive install mandatory for the main game or full disc image installation based on the gamer's choice. That way, those with low hard drive space has no problem playing any game at any time and those who love to install to hard drive have the option to do full install for every game.

Do not worry about TRIM or garbage collection for a PS3 SSD. The only time you need to worry about those sorts of things on an SSD, would be when you have a LOT of writing/deleting of data. Windows does this quite a bit with all of the caching, paging and indexing it does, but a PS3 does sequential writes, exclusively, and when it reads, the majority of the time they will be sequential reads, and rarely random reads. TRIM will never even be necessary as long as the drive has some sort of wear-levelling, which all SSDs have had for a few years now.

what is taking up 40 gb on your ps3? If it's all game data, then upgrade your hard drive.... if it's videos and other junk you can move toa PC or other device, do that.... hard drive prices are ridiculously expensive right now so I would wait on buying a new drive

Got my Momentus XT installed, backup utility worked great. I'm wondering why I had to activate my system though, isn't system activation tied to the system, not the hard drive? Was I supposed to de-activate my system before I took out the other HD? I don't recall ever reading that.

Ain't that the truth! I can't believe how high they are at the moment.

Wasn't sure where else to post this, I am looking to upgrade my hard drive on my Slim to 500GB or more, really need it with all the Playstaion Plus deals. I was wondering what are good hard drives right now, I bought from newegg in past for laptop with no problems, but if you look at many of the recent hard drive reviews I see many complaining about failures. Anyone had luck with PS3 with Western Digital, Samsung or Seagate hard drives?

Also I have heard that 5200 RPM and 7200 RPM drives in PS3 gameplay don't show much difference, so wouldn't that mean it be better to just buy a 5200rpm hard drive since it would produce less heat in the PS3? Or is that false?

I just picked up this 750 gb Seagate drive on Amazon for $81.99. They price-matched the buy.com price when I chatted with one of their customer service reps after ordering it earlier today. And I get it tomorrow.

This will be my second upgrade (20gb --> 120gb --> 750 gb) in this beast of a launch machine. I hope I didn't tighten the screws on the enclosure as much as they did in the factory, because it was a bitch for me to get open the first time. *Insert piers / hammer joke here*

Thanks a lot that drive is getting good reviews and seems a good fit, gonna give it a shot.

I have a 500 gig seagate hard drive on the way. I'm upgrading my PS Slim 120. Now I don't have a external drive to temporarily copy my stuff over to. I do however have another PS3 80 gig. Would I be able to transfer stuff onto my 80 gig and then transfer back to the newly installed 500 gig drive?

Sorry, I have no idea. I just went with one that had good reviews on amazon.