Upgrade Time

Second time if I'm honest...

Having bought an 80Gb PS3, I upgraded the drive to 150Gb a couple of years ago. And promptly filled it. No matter, call it budgeting...

But, I've been reading up on how faster drives makes for better load times, and we're all about driving faster here - had to be done.

As always, the thrill of the chase is better than the event - so lots of research over the various merits of 7200rpm versus Solid State drives.

And it boils down to this:

• 7200rpm is technically slower but your PS3 won't notice as it's got a slow interface.
• SSD is cooler. Allegedly.
• Price per Gb is huge though, expect 2-3 times the space for your dollar with 7200rpm.

So 7200rpm it was. Though I must confess that I was tempted to go the SSD approach - my PS3 seems to be working so very hard to stay cool these days.

That was until I got gifted a free 500Gb 7200rpm drive. Win.

So to fitting, there are lots of guides online, but not one that brings the whole set into one place, I'll cover the salient points here, look up the rest...

• Backup is a pain 150Gb takes four hours to complete.
• The USB ports on what I'll call a "Normal" PS3 are not enough to power an external drive of any note. I ended up using a dual USB cable and plugging the power feed into a seperate device give it juice. This worked, but it was a half hour before hand of trying to figure out why my external drive wasn't being picked up.
• Make sure you have a USB stick with the latest firmware update on it. In the correct folder structure.
• Make sure you have your PS3 charging cable handy (it requires a direct connection on restart with new drive) and it's not being re-purposed to connect your backup drive. Doh!
• Expect another 4 hours on the way back in.
• Don't bother resetting sound setup etc if you use an amp, the backup brings across all settings.

And ultimately that was that. I now have a 7200rpm drive in my PS3 with acres of space. And you know what I can't tell any difference in load times at all. Perhaps I'm honest (compared to the myriad of posts out there) thanks to the fact my drive was free and I don't have to justify my spend...

Anyway, time to sit back and enjoy new downloaded games and continued greatness of my PS3.