Now that the PS3 can be jailbroken the likelihood of people wanting to upgrade their internal hard drive to one of a bigger capacity naturally increases - we dont need to go into why
So I thought I would generate this thread to point out a few tips when it comes to sourcing and installing a new hard drive for the PS3.
First up as already covered in the sticky FAQ on jailbreaking some of the bigger 1TB 2.5 inch hard drives simply will not fit out of the box in the PS3 as their thickness is not standard (12mm v std 9.5mm) so make sure what you buy can fit!
Edit: A 1TB drive could be made to fit the internal bay by modifying the caddy (requires cutting away of the "lip" that runs down one side of the drive)
Secondly there are numerous reports of SataII hard drives (especially 500GB+ ones) running at 3.0Gb/s causing stuttering, audio out of sync, long installation times and long FTP transfers to/from PC. To avoid this the hard drives need to be put into SataI mode (1.5Gb/s).
At present Seagate Momentus hard drives can be jumpered to change this whereas Samsung Spinpoints can use their ESTOOL software to change it. At present there is NO fix for Western Digital Scorpio drives so avoid these for now!
Thirdly when it comes to re-installing the 3.41 firmware (should it be required) make sure the correct version is chosen. Again with reference to the sticky FAQ and the link provided there - the ideal version is the one dated Aug 02 2010. The reason for this is that the original 3.41 firmware was prone to failing at 0% and 44% during re-installation. Just double check the MD5 before you install so that you have the correct one - a tool like FastSum can do the checking. Then just make sure the file is inside the correct location on your USB drive in the directory PS3/UPDATE (needs to be capitals I believe).
Finally so that this can become a more definitive pointer to choosing and installing a new internal hard drive I naturally welcome any feedback and additional pointers that I could include.
So I thought I would generate this thread to point out a few tips when it comes to sourcing and installing a new hard drive for the PS3.
First up as already covered in the sticky FAQ on jailbreaking some of the bigger 1TB 2.5 inch hard drives simply will not fit out of the box in the PS3 as their thickness is not standard (12mm v std 9.5mm) so make sure what you buy can fit!
Edit: A 1TB drive could be made to fit the internal bay by modifying the caddy (requires cutting away of the "lip" that runs down one side of the drive)
Secondly there are numerous reports of SataII hard drives (especially 500GB+ ones) running at 3.0Gb/s causing stuttering, audio out of sync, long installation times and long FTP transfers to/from PC. To avoid this the hard drives need to be put into SataI mode (1.5Gb/s).
At present Seagate Momentus hard drives can be jumpered to change this whereas Samsung Spinpoints can use their ESTOOL software to change it. At present there is NO fix for Western Digital Scorpio drives so avoid these for now!
Thirdly when it comes to re-installing the 3.41 firmware (should it be required) make sure the correct version is chosen. Again with reference to the sticky FAQ and the link provided there - the ideal version is the one dated Aug 02 2010. The reason for this is that the original 3.41 firmware was prone to failing at 0% and 44% during re-installation. Just double check the MD5 before you install so that you have the correct one - a tool like FastSum can do the checking. Then just make sure the file is inside the correct location on your USB drive in the directory PS3/UPDATE (needs to be capitals I believe).
Finally so that this can become a more definitive pointer to choosing and installing a new internal hard drive I naturally welcome any feedback and additional pointers that I could include.
