External Hard Drive?

[jono_0101]

Originally Posted by SkantDragon

Some of the information in your replies so far is flat wrong. Beware.

To answer your question, an external hard drive isn't going to cut it for what you're trying to do. Only certain operations will work with an external hard drive at all, and all of those are from the XMB, not from within games.

Pretty much, you can offload unprotected videos, pictures, and music to the external HD and that's about it. Game saves can be manually copied to it, but this is a transport or backup mechanism. Games don't save directly to an external HD.

PSN video store movie downloads are protected and can only be stored on the internal hard drive.

If you do want to work with an external HD, it can be shared between a PS3 and a PC. All of the PS3 operations just create normal directories and files on the HD. It doesn't use special partitions or anything like that. Note that the PS3 only works with FAT32 format partitions. It can't read Microsoft's proprietary NTFS format. This can create some difficulty since modern Windows typically won't offer the option to format a large external HD in anything other than NTFS. Since the drive probably comes preformated with FAT32, just don't format it in Windows and it will be fine.

At this point, I would recommend that you purchase a new internal hard drive for your PS3. Research it. Most, but not all 2.5" drives work well in the PS3. Some are physically too tall to fit into the drive bay. And some will function, but do not perform adequately. I was going to get a 500Gb Seagate for mine, but my research showed that a lot of people were complaining about poor performance with that model. I went with a 500Gb Samsung instead, and it's been working very well.

Since your external HD is already working with the PS3, I would recommend that you keep it for just a little longer. Use the backup utility under System Settings in the PS3 to backup your internal 40Gb drive to your external HD. Then install your new internal HD in the PS3 and restore from the external HD. You'll end up with all of your settings and files exactly as before, but just a bigger hard drive. It's easy and it works really well.

After you've done that operation, then go ahead and return the external HD to the store if you still want to. Just basically... you need an external HD to facilitate the internal HD swap without losing your existing data. So it's convenient that you just happen to already have one on hand.

great, thanks for the help, thats what it was looking like to me since i didnt see any option to switch what drive game info is saved on, those initial game installs take up a lot of space, i dont have much else on there besides a few PSN games, i was just hoping an external would be easier since its pretty much plug and play and didnt require opening anything up, but ill probably try swapping out the internal HD today then


EDIT: does that mean after restoring the new internal with all the info from the old one, will i have to reinstall all the initial info for each game onto the new HDD?