What’s good, Tech Talk? Got a question for people who’ve upgraded their PS3 hard drives, preferably those who’ve had a larger HDD in their system for a while now.
I have a 60 gig fat (w/ BC compatibility) and am used to having a bit of room to play with video files and demos, but now my DLC, PSN purchases, and installed games have piled up. I’ve already synced my trophies, copied saves over to a flash drive, and run the back up utility to an external USB drive.
The actual installation process looks easy enough, but I’d just like to know what drives people have installed in their PS3s and how they’re performing - What manufacturer, model, and capacity? What about heat/sound compared to the stock drive? How long have they lasted?
Also, what did you do with the old drive? Any enclosures you’d recommend?
I could go a little cheaper for a 5400rpm drive or different brands (like Western Digital), but I think paying $10 for better performance and manufacturers who are considered the best in the notebook drive business isn’t too bad.
Travelstar is Hitachi’s 2.5 HDDs. I used to have a 250gb WD Blue in mine but I never came close to using all the space in mine so I put the 120gb back in. I would try and find a used cheap 160gb+ for like $25 on a forum somewhere.
I’d go with a Caviar Black at least. The cache will presumably help noticeably though I know that’s up for debate. If you have the money I also might go with a WD RE3 Enterprise HDD, it’s a caviar black but with an enterprise level of quality (ie, fail rates are lower). It’s somewhat pointless since by the time your HDD fails, something else might have gone wrong with your PS3 but just throwing it out there.
I am not 100% on this but from what I have heard it is better to use a 5400 RPM. I’m not sure what the reasons are. I think it has something to do with extra heat created.
Using a 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM doesn’t make a huge difference, but the 7200 RPM drive does create a wee bit more heat. My brother in law has been running with a 7200 RPM for a while now without any issues.
Alright, thanks for the info! I’ll be going with a 5400rpm drive then - having slightly lower heat and being cheaper are definite pluses over a speed increase that the PS3 doesn’t even really take advantage of.
I was going by drive performance in notebooks with my initial choices (Hitachis make rock solid drives, give 'em a look if anyone’s actually looking to put a 2.5" drive into a laptop, lol), but seems like plenty of people have been upgrading their PS3s with WD drives with success.
So 500gb WD Scorpio Blue + the Rosewill enclosure. Putting in my order at Newegg now. Thanks, SRK. :tup:
Just thought I’d mention I have a 320gb Hitachi Travelstar, 7200rpm in mine. I notice the fan kicking in a bit more than it used to, but otherwise no issues. I’m thinking of bumping up to a 500gb WD though, one that runs a bit cooler.
do you guys have to redownload your games if you change your hd? or the tickets that says you bought it? if you change your hd? or is there a cache on the ps3 if it’s the same ps3 that allows you to not have to do that? and secondly, if i get a new ps3, do all these extra downloads of the game count against me in terms of ownership of the product? i heard you could only redownload games 5 times or 3 times before you’ll have to rebuy it.
and lastly do you have to delete your account off of other ps3 systems if you want to regain those downloads? if you’ve allowed others to download your games?
I’d presume you could transfer files between the HD’s with the PS3’s built-in USB 2.0 ports…
Problem is that the transfers will be as slow as heck unless they’re just text and mp3 files. Video and larger sized files (MB’s and GB’s) take forever to transfer. Note that whatever you transfer has to go into the right folder. If you just transfer things without taking that into consideration, you might as well start over from scratch as far as the PS3 is concerned. I’ve never done this myself but I’m in the same boat as you – how DO you transfer all your saves and downloads to a new drive without misplacing or losing your credits, trophies, system info, etc.???
500 GB (2.5" – that’s all that will fit the PS3 case) is the largest laptop drive size I’ve seen in-store and they are finally starting to get significantly cheaper. Whether we’ll see TB-size drives finally show up for laptops in-store, I don’t know…
I had a PS3 40g fat (it died) and now a 120g slim. Both of them got upgraded to the exact same 320gb drive by seagat. $70 at a Best Buy on sale. A great purchase and I’m no where near filling it…even with ripping lots of mp3 to is so I don’t have to listen to “indestructible” on SFIV. I took the 40gb from the fat and put it in an external enclosure. $10 on tigerdirect. I forget the brand/model…I ended up giving it to a friend.
I took the 120gb out fo the slim and upgraded a friends laptop that had to have a fresh install of Windows anyway…previously it had only a 80gb…so little more room for my friend now.
There is a built in backup utility on the PS3 that will allow you to back up all of your save data to an external source (flash drive, external hdd, etc) as long as it is formatted to FAT32. Bear in mind that FAT32 will have size limitation in Windows unless you only format 32GB or less, so you will need to use a third party format utility such as the one HP has that will format FAT32 drives to any size. All of your online purchases will have to be either re-downloaded or reinitialized.
Your knowledge on the PSN 5 downloads thing is one of the biggest misconceptions of the PSN policy, I’ve been confused a while since my friend told me this but found out months later he was wrong. You can redownload whatever is on your downloads list as many times as you want. your PSN account can only ever be used on 5 different PS3 consoles. It’s to cover anyone who breaks their ps3 and needs to get a new one. 5 is more than enough, one shouldn’t need to be going through ps3’s unless he/she is extremely unlucky.
So remember, 5 PS3’s, not 5 Downloads.
I’m also pretty sure deleting the account won’t change this number either. Every ps3 is unique and once you sign on, it’s marked as one of the 5 ps3s left you can sign on with, I think.
WD is better than seagate now IMO. I don’t know if seagate has stepped up their game in reliable HDs recently or not. Last seagate I owned died on me within a week, RMA’d and died on me again on a different model.
I have had nothing but problems with Maxtor/Seagate in the last couple years. ATA, SCSI, whatever, just an abnormal number of failures. I am done with Seagate for a while.
Got a question for people who’ve upgraded their PS3 hard drives, preferably those who’ve had a larger HDD in their system for a while now.