217w ago - Although many here have already upgraded their PS3 HDD, those who haven't yet due to being intimidated by the task may wish to check out the following guide:
It's not as intimidating as it looks. If you can handle a screw driver, you can swap out your PS3 hard disk.
PS3 Hard Drive Upgrade Options:
Western Digital -
320GB
Western Digital -
500GB
Since we were the guinea pigs, we'll briefly inform you of where we went wrong and how you can upgrade without error.
1. Careful with the screws - I make this the first point even before backing up because of issues we both had. I could be wrong, but the PS3 screws are made of some soft metal such as pewter. We both stripped out at least one screw.
2. Backup Data - Either flash drives or external hard drives can be used for this process. If you NEED all your saved games back, make sure you have a FAT32 external hard drive, and run the backup utility from "System Settings" then "Backup Utility".
Finally, check out the video below if you haven't seen it yet:
Anyone else here played that Fast and Furious game yet? Its the worst car racing game ever. It looks about 10 years old and plays about 20 years old. ...
You remove the plastic cover... then remove the blue screw. It holds down a metal "latch" that you lift up. Now just pull straight up and the drive pulls right out. In the older systems, you had to slide it sideways, now you just pull it straight up.
Four more screws and the drive itself comes out. I had no trouble lining up the holes or with stripping. Maybe it's the newer design. But then just plug it back in, put the blue screw back in, and pop the plastic cover back on. Done! Took me about three minutes total.
I used a 250 gig drive leftover from when I put a 500 in my laptop. If I had had a little more $$ I would have put a 500 in it too. BTW, a note to anybody getting a 500 gig drive -- be SURE you get one that is only 9.5" tall (1/8"). There are a couple out there that are 12.5mm and won't fit. So look closely at the specs before you buy and be sure it's the right height.
Also... once it's back together and you power back up and go through the initial setup, it's a good time to go ahead and partition your drive if you plan to install Linux, even if you won't install until later. Get it done, then do your Restore.
Rob
When I upgraded my 40GB to 80GB (had a drive laying around), my restore didn't succeed. I'm not sure it would have restored the purchased games, but from what I've gathered, no, purchased games aren't backed up.
Fortunately, I was able to re-download the games for free. Takes a while, of course (particularly over wifi) but there were no other problems.
I replaced my 60Gig PS3 drive with a 320Gb drive a while back (was max 2.5 inch drive available at the time). I have a word of warning for you all...
I store a large number of video files on my PS3 (Mainly downloaded TV shows), all of which are setup in their own "Albums" - e.g. "Heroes", "Stargate", "The Big Bang Theory" etc.
I recently had a problem with this however (with the drive coming up to around 250gb full) where the PS3 decided to do a repair on the system database. Unfortunately this repair completely wiped all 'album' information from all the files - the end result being that all 250gigs worth of video files all lost their albums and ended up being marked as "Unknown". What a pain in the a..! (Luckily it didn't loose the actual files though!!!!!!)
Anyway, I ended up having to archive everything off to a 1Tb external WD drive and manually moved the files into correctly formatted folders!
So in conclusion:-
If you store loads of data, be prepared that you might loose the PS3 specific ALBUM info at the most inconvenient time.
Also there is a real need for SONY to improve the file options.
They need to add a "Set Album for Multiple files" type option (to accompany the "Copy Multiple" and "Delete Multiple" options if they're going to have a usable multimedia device!)
Bit off topic, but the new features I'd really like to see soon:-
1. "Set 'Album' for Multiple Files"
2. Show music files by Artist, then Album. (I've got 20+ gigs of music and it all just gets messed up on the PS3 because you can't structure the view like you can with directories!) Or maybe some management tool similar to the Gallery tool.
e.g.
Kaiser Chiefs\
Kaiser Chiefs\Employment\
Kaiser Chiefs\Employment\Everyday I Love You Less and Less.mp3
Kaiser Chiefs\Employment\... etc ...
Kaiser Chiefs\Yours Truly, Angry Mob\
Kaiser Chiefs\Yours Truly, Angry Mob\Ruby.mp3
Kaiser Chiefs\Yours Truly, Angry Mob\... etc ...
Anyway got that off my chest now
PSPSwampy
It could have told you how to restore your saves also.