upgrading PS3 hard drive

[spaceboy]

I will soon undertake a bit of a facelift on my PS3 by upgrading the hard drive.  I've got on 80GB model and after some cleaning it has about 20 open.  It was down to like 8 open before.  I could uninstall some old games, but I didn't want to.  The problem would just come back.   So one of the nice things is they use standard 2.5" SATA laptop drives.  I found a 500GB drive for $55.  It had high marks on Amazon.  I'll post how it goes, I expect to do it sometime this week/weekend hopefully.

It'll obviously have tons of room for more games - I may finally get those AC2 DLC missions now... but also I can feel free to put some music on there.  I'm interested in using the custom soundtrack feature for GT5.

I sure hope it goes smoothly!

[PZ]

Good luck, space, and I'll be interested in how it goes.  Can you transfer the existing content to the new drive or do you need to reinstall everything?

[spaceboy]

you can keep it.  The steps should be:
1. copy/backup entire drive to an external HDD (gotta be formatted fat32 unfortunately)
2. take out old drive, put in new drive
3. install all firmware updates on new drive
4. restore all data to new drive.

I will definitely let you know how it goes.

[PZ]

Cool - I have the same system you have so it would be great to have a larger HD.  Plus, it would be good to have the data backed up in cases of crashes.  Another possible benefit of backing up data is that you could then access any recorded movies or saved games for posting on the Internet.  :-X

[spaceboy]

Well that access won't w@&k like that unfortuntely (I'm learning here) - but the PS3 needs the external drive to be in FAT32 format and our PCs all use NTFS format.  I'm pretty sure I read what you'd see on the external drive if you could see it is a big "file" that contains all your data - I could be wrong on that part.

Either way the same drive that you use for backup can't be used with windows.  It's odd to me because you can backup game saves individually on a USB stick and copy them to a PC (although they don't often w@&k like PC game saves to send to others  Most games lock the saves to specific users due to the whole trophy system primarily)

Anyways,  I had thought about partitioning an ext hdd I have as partially FAT32 but now I may buy a separate one since a) I think you can't partition without removing all data on the drive b) it might be nice to have a dedicated backup drive which I could do more often and c) it's kind of a pain to unhook everything.

[Art Blade]

good luck with your adventure there, space :)  :-X

[PZ]

Partitioning is something that you should do when you first have a new (or one that you intend to clear of everything) drive that you want to use - you can partition as fat32 or NTFS, or a combination of the two (in different partitions of course).

It will be interesting to see what you experience  :-X

[spaceboy]

well I caved to convenience and the easy factor by buying a new portable 500GB external to use for the backup process (and backups going forward).  I pretty much read what you confirmed there and I didn't feel like smoking off everything on my other drive, then partitioning.  I also figure I'd definitely blow off future backups if I had to unhook that drive and bring it over.  This portable drive is beautiful and thin and really cool...and currently sitting for a few hours already trying to format to FAT32.  I'm using some free swissknife program I found.  The goal tonight is the formatting.  Not sure how far I'll get tomorrow on the next steps.

[PZ]

Best of luck, space - are you formatting the drive on your PC?  A couple of hours to format seems a bit excessive.

[spaceboy]

yes and I guess the problem is I chose "full format" instead of "quick format"  I figured yeah do the real deal.  But it wound up crashing and after a reboot blah blah blah I was able to do the quick format to FAT32.  At first it kept showing it as NTFS and then after I closed the program finally My Computer had it show up as FAT32.  So I guess it's all good to go, but I'm done for the night.  I probably made this step harder than it needed to be, but I blame it on Microsoft for not having FAT32 as a formatting option from Disk Management. 

Strangely enough the 1 yr old My Book external I have is formatted FAT32 and I certainly did not do that so it must have come that way. 

[PZ]

Interesting that a drive would come that way these days - the cluster size of NTFS makes it much more efficient for lots of small files than fat32

[spaceboy]

that's what I thought after learning all of this.  It is a WD MyBook drive.

...  I just googled and checked on Amazon - a different version of my drive is mentioned in a review as coming pre-formatted to FAT32 to accomodate different platforms, but most PC uses will want to reformat to NTFS (which I had no idea and did not) - looks like I may want to reformat and re-backup anyways lol.

But what exactly is the limitation of FAT32 - something I read says file sizes of 4GB, but I know I've copied larger files to that drive. Plus certainly some files on the PS3 are over 4GB.  This stuff is kind of confusing to me.

[PZ]

Although there are interesting alternate circumstances, I believe the Windows limit to drive size using fat32 is 32 gb, but my memory may not serve me properly

[spaceboy]

well I kicked off the backup utility after painstakingly copying all individual save files just to be safe.  After a minute of calcing the estimated time is 2 hours (0% complete though lol).  ooh as I'm typing it changed to 1 hr 28 mins!  Now I'm off to play Killzone on my PS2 while I wait!  I think I'll let it sit and do the restore to the new drive tomorrow night.  It'll be late enough I won't want to start plus I figure let it start the restore nice and cool instead of hot.

[PZ]

Typical computer mentality - hurry up so I can make you wait.

[spaceboy]

new drive is installed and I'm restoring the data.  I sure hope everything comes together as planned...

[spaceboy]

installed and done!  really easy and I'll give a full rundown later, the only goofy thing is once you've restored your trophies and everything looks good once you put on one of your games it essentially erases that game's trophies and then you start earning them (pling, pling, pling) based on your save file I guess.  Not sure if it's all your save files though or just the one you opened.  SO>>>  you just quit the game, resync your trophies with the server and then everything works as normal again.  So basically if you put a game in you're going to have to quit, resync, and start the game again.  Kind of a pain, but not a real big deal.

[JRD]

Typical computer mentality - hurry up so I can make you wait.

Hell yeah!!!  ^+-+

Nice to see that PS3 has that kind of "upgrading function"... it is something new for me PC gamer. I only played PS one and we had no such things!  :-X :-X :-X

[spaceboy]

you bet JRD!  It is really a nice option, and even detailed in the user manual, that you can backup your data then swap out the hard drive with a standard laptop drive.  I'll say that is quite consumer friendly thinking by Sony.  Same goes for the ability to use standard bluetooth headsets so if you already have one for your phone, you can just use it instead of having to buy a proprietary headset. (of course I did get the Sony bluetooth since I didn't have one and I like the huge Mute button on the side :-() )

[PZ]

Great w@&k, space!  Thanks for reporting - my hard disk is becoming rather full as well and I could use an upgrade.  :-X

[spaceboy]

lol PZ  from a guy that buit his own gaming rig - this stuff if childs play to you!   Oh and a extra step was taking the time to vacuum out every orafice of the console while I had it unplugged and open a bit.

Honestly - the process couldn't be easier and it makes perfect sense - other than the trophy resync.

I did find this morning with one game I tried that just putting the disc in then going to resync got the job done so it appears you may not need to get into the game and back out etc.  I hope that stands true for all games.  Obviously any game you don't own anymore or don't intend to play you can just leave it, and you can also just wait to do this process until you actuall play the game again.  There won't be a problem as long as you remember to sync those trophies to Sony's servers BEFORE doing your initial backup from the old drive.

[PZ]

Building a PC these days is probably no more difficult that what you did because of the sequencing that is important in maintaining the console's data integrity without losing anything!

Good tip on the trophies - it would be a shame to lose those and start from scratch  ;)

[Art Blade]

well done, space  :) :-X