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A few days ago, Brian Ziel of Seagate stopped by the office to show us how easy it is to swap out the hard drive on the Playstation 3. For this demonstration, he brought with him the following:

- Seagate 160 GB serial ATA hard drive, 2.5". This will soon be your brand new hard drive inside your PS3
- A mini Phillips screwdriver



- A Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition, USB 160 GB External Hard drive. We'll use this to move the current content on the PS3's hard drive over.


First, plug in the OneTouch III. The PS3 will automatically recognize it as another storage device. Now, move the content you want to keep from the original drive to the OneTouch III. Once this is complete, turn off your PS3 and unplug the OnceTouch.


Next, put the PS3 on its side, remove the small plastic cover on the hard drive bay, and then unscrew the blue screw that holds the hard drive in place. Lift up the small metal tab, slide the drive to your right, and then pull out. Now remove the small screws on the side of the metal tray that carries your current serial ATA 2.5" drive.


Place the new 160 GB drive in the metal tray, reverse the process with the screws, slide it back into the PS3, and put back the blue screw along with the plastic covering of the hard drive enclosure.


Now plug in the Maxtor OneTouch III once again and move your old content onto the new drive inside your PS3, and you're all set.

Beneficial? Hell yes. Especially when more and more content starts to show up on the Playstation store and you just need more and more drive space. Overall, the benefits to this are potentially huge, but not quite a must-have, yet. Once Sony's online network really starts to pick up speed, offering more content for download, you're going to want the extra storage goodness.

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Yeah that would be easy to do. It's just plug and play, no soldering, no nuclear fission...... whip out, whip in

oh and also


VOIDVOIDVOID PS3

edit - oops *corrects self*, sorry I forgot that the HDD is in a separate part so as the HDD can be replaced by anyone. Never mind the void lol

I think this would be a pretty easy task also, but I'm not sure why someone wouldn't just plus an external USB2.0 HD into the PS3 and use it for extra storage?

meh, ease of use and good-looks factor? lol

Oh God that was the Paris Hilton answer, but I'll let that pass...

We here a lot of people talking about how they want this HD in the PS3 and don't want this one, I just kind of wondered why they wouldn't buy the cheapest one and find a reasonably priced external HD. I guess I should check on the transfer rates of usb2.0 and sata before writing that though...

SATA can handle either 1.5Gbps, 3.0 Gbps depending. The new technology they are trying to bring in is 6.0Gbps

USB 2.0 is only 480Mbps, less than a third of the lowest standard SATA plug

ah ha, then that's a good reason to upgrade the HD though if you had an external HD it wouldn't be soo bad.

Kudos to Sony for allowing the HDD to be so easily accessible. For the size of the PS3, I honestly would have expected a 3.5" HDD though, which are bigger in size and storage, and cheaper.

As for upgrading the drive, it really depends. If the PS3 can read and write to NTFS (no FAT because of the 4GB file size limit) file system, then an external has the perks of being able to be used by the PS3 and your PC. Externals are also cheaper than internals (strangely enough), especially if you get a 3.5" external. In addition, you won't lose your current internal drive.

You'd get the best performance out of the internal, no doubt, and it would be much cleaner. If I really had to pick, I would probably go with external and just hold media on it, and use the internal for anything gameplay related.

I think the size of the PS3 is mainly due to them not wanting a huge external power brick and so I believe much of that is on the inside.

Doesn't the PS3 HDD use HFS? I'm not sure, but I don't think it's FAT, with the easy readability, and lack of lockdown/protection add on possibilities. It may even be a proprietary format. Does anyone have more info on this?

PS3 formats it for you.  This seems to be a very good value.

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I went back to the source information on the quote, and saw that the 120gb HD they put in the PS3 is actually priced at $66.99 now. I don't know how you could go wrong. I mean hell, that's almost the price of 1 game...

my friend put a 250gb in his

very cool and welcome to the Playstation part of the forum halojames. I think this is a pretty cool discover...I say discover because I didn't realize Sony made it possible to add a larger hard drive into the PS3 with such ease.