Scott McLaughlin

Recently I was reading that Sony has announced the ability to buy or rent HD movies via your Playstation 3. Hey that seems pretty cool. Especially because the prices to buy are $9.99 – $14.99. Holy shit thats way cheaper then a stinking $39.99 blu-ray disc. Especially for movies I don’t really like enough to own on blu-ray for the price or lame special features it might have.

Then I started thinking…well I guess the 40GB drive in my PS3 suddenly seemed inadequate or would be in a short order of time. So I ventured into the world of upgrading my PS3 hard drive. Now lots of people have done this successfully but most people did it on older units and older firmware. So I figured I’d write up my experience here since I have a fairly new unit on the latest firmware release.

For starters you need a drive. First off I research the type of drive, it requires a SATA 3.0GB interface drive, standard IDE drives won’t work. Secondly it appears that the PS3 will accept any size up to 500GB. There aren’t any available bigger then that right now, so who knows what its maximum is.

Thirdly I looked into speed. There’s a lot of work people have already done to determine if 7200 RPM is any better or workable then the 5400 RPM that comes in the PS3. Apart from about a 2s faster boot time there’s no advantage to the 7200 RPM, a bit more heat but nothing the PS3 can’t handle. I was unable to find any 7200 RPM 500GB laptop drives made by a manufacturer that I trust that were actually in stock. On top of that they were almost 30% more cost. Since there’s no real upside to the 7200 i said screw it, stuck with my favorite drive manufacturer Hitatchi and picked up a 320GB 5400 RPM drive.

Some words of advice. This drive change completely wipes out the PS3 and everything on it. It comes up stupid as bag of hammers and wants you to reload the OS from an external source (USB drives work awesome). So plan on a bit of work to recover. The PS3 can be backed up to USB memory cards/drives and so can your saved games, so do that step. Also plan on having to re-download from the Sony Store anything you previously downloaded, including games, add-ons, demos, videos, etc…

My drive arrived and with much excitement and the kids out of my hair (down at grandmas) i dove into the Pain. I used this set of instructions which for the latest PS3 on the newest firmware works perfectly.

I grabbed a 1GB SDMini card and shoved it into my USB fob and backed up the PS3 as well as my saved games. (if you have multiple profiles make sure to get the saved data off those too). I then logged into Sony’s site and found the latest PS3 OS load and put it onto the same SD card. Be SURE to put the Firmware file into the exact directory name listed in the instructions (/PS3/UPDATE). The file is called PS3UPDAT.PUP. (didn’t 8.3 filenames die like 10 years ago?)

I removed the old drive, jammed in the new one and booted it up. I got the big ugly message saying “You suck I have no operating system” press these keys on the controller to format the drive and reload from USB. It also needed the USB Controller cables since it completely forgets where its controllers are.

The format took about 15 minutes, the OS reload took another 5-10. Once the OS was installed, no patching was necessary because the download from Sony was the latest version.

Checking the systems information option in settings, I see that the drive (320GB) formatted out at about 296GB and the OS sucked that down to about 285GB free. Kick ass.

The unit comes up in default mode, so after restoring your backup and saved game files you have to do some tweaking. I then re-setup my Sony online profile, logged in and sucked down the previously downloaded items I have (which was only a couple).

Lastly, now that I’m up and working I figured lets check out the online store for movies! To my suprise there was over 50 HD movies (some are SD which is 720p) but thats okay. There was a crap load of additional stuff not in HD. Including tons of TV series, documentaries, films, etc…

I hadn’t watched “Meet the Spartans” all the way through and what I had watched was hilarious so i figured that’d be my test movie. It was available for rent at $4.99 or purchase at $14.99 and was the Unrated version… So I just bought it (I haven’t tried out rental yet, but I will and post my results). The download was 1.6GB and took about 20 minutes on my 8Meg cable modem. It was peg’d.

The movie shows up in the Video menu option ready to play. I’m watching it now in 1080 and its fabulous.

So do it now, you know you want to.