So I finally made the decision to upgrade the Playstation 3 hard drive. I got the Hitachi travelstar 750GB drive. It’s a standard 2.5in 9.5mm height, 5400RPM drive. Unfortunately, it’s a 4k advanced format drive, which from the information gathered, the PS3 OS is supposed to not support it and have some performance issue which causes game stuttering. But still I took the bite, worst case I can always return it… My Playstation 3 was the original 60GB. I’ve been wanted to upgrade the hard drive for a while, but never made the decision until the recent PSN hacking incident where I can get a few games for free. That pushed me to switch out the hard drive, pretty in desperate of needing one. And here’s the story:
Frist found a used drive, formatted it with large fat32, and performed a backup, the went well. Then went out to get the drive, and here’s where the adventure started… The screws! I never thought the screws would cause so much trouble! Without the right size screw driver, it’s impossible to unscrew these damn 5 screws. Well, the blue screw isn’t that bad for the tool I have. But for the 4 small screws that mount the drive, it’s virtually impossible to make them move! I fought them for a good two hours, after getting tips online using the plier since I stripped two of them. After replacing the drive, I replaced the two stripped ones with the standard screws which have the rounded head and sticking out on the latching side. These two will fit into the case, on the other side, I just screwed the original ones with again the plier… The standard ones don’t fit. And I think I’ve overcome all the trouble. But no, the last step which restoring the backup failed mysteriously. I got error message 800283E7 around 21%. Upon researching, it’s probably some issues with external hard drive, or game DRM. So lessons learned, never trust the software. When backup, you should perform a system backup, AS WELL AS a manual backup. The system backup files are just a bunch of encrypted *.dat files, it’s useless since there’s no way to stripe them out… Fortunately I don’t have much loss since the original hard drive was 60GB only (an OEM seagate), and my backup size was 32GB with mostly games, mp3, and pictures. The games I can always retrieve from the downloading list. For the mp3, it’ll take a while for me to re-rip though.
The process which originally I thought was really simple, took me a whole damn day to do, and still failed miserably. It’s THE most frustrating thing I’ve encountered with my Playstation 3.
As far as the new hard drive performance, I can’t say much yet. I’ll keep updated. But right now, I’ve copied around 100GB video files onto the hard drive through TVersity’s DLNA server, and it’s been really smooth.
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