Howto: Upgrade Your PS3 Hard Drive

from Kotaku


One of the neatest features of the Playstation 3, in my book, is that you can swap out the hard drive it comes with yourself using an off-the-shelf hard drive. Sure it may be pretty self-explanatory to some, but not everyone knows how to upgrade the hard drive on their Playstation 3. Fortunately, Seagate was kind enough to send me a little howto guide and kit. The guide walks you through the relatively painless process for upgrading your 40GB or 80GB hard drive to something roomier, like say a 160GB drive.

The upgrade allows you to swap out the built-in drive with a new one, without losing any of your content. Why is Seagate explaining how to upgrade a Playstation 3? Because they sell hard drives silly. Hit the jump for the even-Brian-can-do-it instructions.

What you need:

• An external hard drive for the backup (Seagate suggests their Maxtor OneTouch Mini)
• A new hard drive (Seagate suggests their Momentus 5400.3 160GB (~$120) or a Momentus 7200.2 160GB (~$160).)
• Mini screwdriver

How to do it:

1. Plug in your external drive and reformat it so the PS3 will recognize it.
2. Copy current PS3 hard drive content to your external drive.
3. Remove the standard issue console drive, following the installation instructions in the PS3 manual.
4. Replace the console drive with a the new drive.
5. Format new drive.
6. Plug in external drive and transfer content to the new drive.
7. Play Uncharted [or whichever game you wish to play].

I have been told by my bro.(He is crazy but knows his stuff. Usualy.) That puting a new HD in a PS3 will void the warranty. Is this true?

No, sony support replacing the HDD's. They even give instructions on taking it out. If they didn't want you replacing them they wouldn't put a door in the case.

I thought about doing this,heck solid state would be even nicer than sata.

Trouble is SSD's currently max out at 32gig... (The first HDD I ever bought was 420mb! for my Amiga) The SSD's are stupid expensive too. I'm happy with my 250gb.

so to get it so the ps3 to reconize and external hard drive you have to format it (im gettin a ps3 for xmas and was just wondering)
so if have an external 250gb seagate, that only has a few gig lest, and to get it to be reconised i will have to get it formated (deleting everything on it?

yes format it to FAT32 and it'll work, but if ur usin windows XP ull have to download a program to do it, (CompuApps SwissKnife is wat i used)