[ks_man]

I've played two games with save files for my PS3 (Tiger Woods and Fight Night). Each game has a save file that takes up about 1MB. Does this mean that all the games I'm ever going to buy and save on the HD will take up less than 1GB?


I'm trying to decide if I want to start loading up the HD with music, pictures and videos, but before I do this I want to get an idea of how much space I will need to save for what I really bought the PS3 for (playing games and watching Blu-ray).


Another question would be what do other people use their HDD for other than save game files.


Thanks for the help

 

[talbain]

give it a shot. load up your hdd with whatever you want and let us know how it goes. when you've gotten your answer, just delete what you no longer want...

 

[gamelover360]

You will not be able to fill up 60 Gigs with music and standard def vids unless you REALLY have a lot of video. HD video is a space hog though.


All my home videos take up 12.5 Gigs, so I am all set.


Plus I plan on getting a new internal Hard Drive next Black Friday. Hopefully 500 Gigs or above!

 

[spwolf]



Quote:
Originally Posted by ks_man /forum/post/0


I've played two games with save files for my PS3 (Tiger Woods and Fight Night). Each game has a save file that takes up about 1MB. Does this mean that all the games I'm ever going to buy and save on the HD will take up less than 1GB?


I'm trying to decide if I want to start loading up the HD with music, pictures and videos, but before I do this I want to get an idea of how much space I will need to save for what I really bought the PS3 for (playing games and watching Blu-ray).


Another question would be what do other people use their HDD for other than save game files.


Thanks for the help

60 GB is alot.... PLUS, you can use external USB drive as well....

 

[gamelover360]



Quote:
Originally Posted by spwolf /forum/post/0


60 GB is alot.... PLUS, you can use external USB drive as well....

Yeah, I currently connect my 400 GB external Hard drive to my PS3.

 

[nbuubu]

A lot of PS3 games will use anywhere from a few hundred megs to a few gigs to install game data to the HDD in order to compensate for the PS3's slightly slower disc transfer rate (compared to the Xbox 360's relatively quick transfer rate). So that will also eat up some HDD space, but not that much in the long run. Even a year from now when we all have multiple games, I doubt we'll need more than 10 games permanently installed on the hard drive.


It's the trade-off you get with Blu-Ray on the PS3. It's transfer rate is slower, but with HDD installs game load times should be comparable to the 360. The benefit is that the PS3 is nearly silent, and you don't need some noisy and annoying DVD drive compensating for the 360's lack of a standard hard drive.

 

[Connavar]



Quote:
Originally Posted by nbuubu /forum/post/0


A lot of PS3 games will use anywhere from a few hundred megs to a few gigs to install game data to the HDD in order to compensate for the PS3's slightly slower disc transfer rate (compared to the Xbox 360's relatively quick transfer rate). So that will also eat up some HDD space, but not that much in the long run. Even a year from now when we all have multiple games, I doubt we'll need more than 10 games permanently installed on the hard drive.


It's the trade-off you get with Blu-Ray on the PS3. It's transfer rate is slower, but with HDD installs game load times should be comparable to the 360. The benefit is that the PS3 is nearly silent, and you don't need some noisy and annoying DVD drive compensating for the 360's lack of a standard hard drive.

Won't loading times be even better since all games can rely on an HDD? At least the ones specifically made for the PS3, not the ports.

 

[ndskyz]

Actually Sony has mandated that all games for the PS3 be able to support the HD. Not that the devs have to use it. Most will take advantage of it to help with load times.

To anwser the OP. I have about 800 Song on My PS3 roughly about 15Gig. These are all recorded at 320kbs (highest quality Mp3) with the Game saves GTHD demo, Motorstorm, and NBA Demo, and all my pics. I still have 26 gig left for games saves and pictures and music...point is. 60 Is pretty big. I was selective in the songs I choose. No need in putting a whole cd on the HD if I only want to hear 4 or 5 songs. Put there is still plenty of room on the HD.. and as mentioned you can hook up an external if you want more room

 

[Dungwader]

Short of there being a lot of MMORPG's coming out for the PS3 (plus you subscribing to them all) 60GB will be plenty IMO.

 

[mooshoo]

I did notice 1 thing about the hard drive though. It says it's a 60GB unit, but the space actually available was more like 50 GB. I understand some of it is used for the OS, but is it actually taking up 10GB of space? That's a lot. Even with the freebie downloads from the PStore, which amounts to about 4.5 GB, that still leaves quite a bit unaccounted for.

 

[aclerok]



Quote:
Originally Posted by mooshoo /forum/post/0


I did notice 1 thing about the hard drive though. It says it's a 60GB unit, but the space actually available was more like 50 GB. I understand some of it is used for the OS, but is it actually taking up 10GB of space? That's a lot. Even with the freebie downloads from the PStore, which amounts to about 4.5 GB, that still leaves quite a bit unaccounted for.

It depends on the way that it calculates free space. Memory storage space can be defined in two ways: 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes or 1GB as 1,073,741,824 bytes. If they are calculating the first way, then the hard drive is really only about 55.5GB, and then the PS3 software is only taking up about 4.5 GB, which seems reasonable to me. Check out the wikipedia article and it explains this a little more.

Gigabyte Definition

 

[spwolf]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Connavar /forum/post/0


Won't loading times be even better since all games can rely on an HDD? At least the ones specifically made for the PS3, not the ports.

yes, it is a lot faster when you use HD, as supposed to dvd drive... So PS3 is a lot faster loading games and levels... I never noticed any problems or slow speeds when loading games.

 

[WriteSimple]

You can Frankenstein your PS3 - but not by much. Instead of using an external HDD and connect it via USB, try a 7-pin male-to-female SATA cable and connect an external SATA HDD with it. With 3.5" HDD you can get 320GB for cheap. Of course, that means you have to put the PS3 on its side.

The How-To is here.



fuad

 

[abeas]

Since the day I got my PS3 mine has read 47/55 GB. So the total drive space is 55 and I have 47 left. I have about 3 mb of game files and maybe 400mb of music. That's it. What the hell is taking up 8GB? Running 1.32 fw.

 

[Slordak]

So assuming the user-usable space is about 48gb, that does certainly seem like a lot, and for individual game saves, certainly that's plenty. However, as noted above, the question of space comes up when doing installs of various games to the HD. These can easily be several gigabytes in space, sometimes up to 8 or 9 gb a piece (!). With just a few of these installed on an HD, a huge portion of the space gets eaten up. Sure, it can easily be recovered, but such games are somewhat relying on this cache mechanism and tend to have substantially slower load times without the data on the drive.

 

[William Mapstone]



Quote:
Originally posted by nbuubu

A lot of PS3 games will use anywhere from a few hundred megs to a few gigs to install game data to the HDD in order to compensate for the PS3's slightly slower disc transfer rate (compared to the Xbox 360's relatively quick transfer rate). So that will also eat up some HDD space, but not that much in the long run. Even a year from now when we all have multiple games, I doubt we'll need more than 10 games permanently installed on the hard drive.


It's the trade-off you get with Blu-Ray on the PS3. It's transfer rate is slower, but with HDD installs game load times should be comparable to the 360. The benefit is that the PS3 is nearly silent, and you don't need some noisy and annoying DVD drive compensating for the 360's lack of a standard hard drive.

Actually on average the PS3 BD drive is about the same speed as the xbox360 DVD drive. The edge would go to the PS3 since every unit has a HDD, so developers can and will use it.

 

[Supermans]



Quote:
Originally Posted by WriteSimple /forum/post/0


You can Frankenstein your PS3 - but not by much. Instead of using an external HDD and connect it via USB, try a 7-pin male-to-female SATA cable and connect an external SATA HDD with it. With 3.5" HDD you can get 320GB for cheap. Of course, that means you have to put the PS3 on its side.

The How-To is here.



fuad

Actually you can still have the ps3 standing up vertical, you just need a long enough adapter wire that can come out the bottom and you simply lay the enclosure next to the ps3 or behind it..

 

[ks_man]

Thanks to all the responses to my question. I just connected to the PS store so I'm sure these demos and trailers will get me started on using my HDD.


As to the issue of games using the HDD for faster load times, how will this work? Is that space only used when the game is playing in the PS3, or does it work like a game save where it is stored on the PS3 all the time and it loads it up when you play the game? I could definitely see if the data is stored on the HDD regardless of whether the game is in or not, and each game being a few gigs, the 60 gigs could get used up real quick as more developers take advantage of the feature.


Thanks.

 

[nbuubu]



Quote:
Originally Posted by William Mapstone /forum/post/0


Actually on average the PS3 BD drive is about the same speed as the xbox360 DVD drive. The edge would go to the PS3 since every unit has a HDD, so developers can and will use it.

I agree for the most part, depending on where on the disc the date is stored or if the Blu-Ray disc data is placed redundantly (as with the upcoming Oblivion port), but the max raw data transfer rate of the 2x Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 is 9MB/sec while the 12x DVD drive in the 360 delivers around 16MB/sec. That's a big difference, which the HDD alleviates significantly, but it's still a big difference.


That 360 advantage comes at a high price though, with the absurd noise level. I'd much rather have a console that's quiet and takes a second or two longer to load than one that's noisy when it spins and is marginally faster.

 

[spwolf]



Quote:
Originally Posted by nbuubu /forum/post/0


I agree for the most part, depending on where on the disc the date is stored or if the Blu-Ray disc data is placed redundantly (as with the upcoming Oblivion port), but the max raw data transfer rate of the 2x Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 is 9MB/sec while the 12x DVD drive in the 360 delivers around 16MB/sec. That's a big difference, which the HDD alleviates significantly, but it's still a big difference.


That 360 advantage comes at a high price though, with the absurd noise level. I'd much rather have a console that's quiet and takes a second or two longer to load than one that's noisy when it spins and is marginally faster.

yep, however there are some things to be taken into consideration.

- Hard Drives are 1.5 Gbs interface

- Due to BD's ability to store large amounts of data, you can leave data uncompressed.


Thats why Resistance takes 5 seconds to load while PC shooters take 15-20 seconds, as they have to uncompress data first, which lowers the speed down to 1-2MBs or less.


Both of these advantages are far superior to xbox's DVD read speed, which you cant really use anyway as you have to uncompress the data on the fly...


I would expect levels to be loaded significantly faster on PS3 than Xbox 360 due to both of these issues.


Thats why PS3 has such big advantage of having standard hard disc and bd drive. Not only for load speeds, but for everything else, developer's lowest setup has 20GB HD drive and 50 GB BD drive. You can see advantage clearly in downloadable games, where MS had 50 MB limit while PS3 has no limit at all (they reccomend 500 MB). Only yesterday MS announced 250 MB support (which current core users cant use, and they will have to buy bigger memory cards).


These are huge advantages for PS3 in the future.