Hacking Perfect set up found - for collectors/hoarders

brollikk

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So I'm on a mission - collecting modded systems and entire libraries if possible. This post is mainly for those who may be interested in doing this in the future.

For the ps3 - the maximum internal hard drive you can put in is a 1.5 TB 2.5" drive (buy this from amazon).

The maximum external drive - theoretically has no limit if you use ps3netserv (stream the games over your network). A huge benefit is that NTFS format drives work, and you don't have to worry about splitting ISO files or if you use folder format games - the potential big size file isn't an issue. The bad part is that when games do need to install game-data... it will take forever.

A physical external drive is the next best thing - and you can go 2 routes - but to make a long story short - a FAT 32 (MBR FORMAT) 8TB drive using split isos is the best possible way to store the maximum amount.

For some reason, the ps3 only plays nicely with MBR format drives as far as I know - and this limits your NTFS drives to 2 tb. However, certain drives can be MBR formatted and also have a humongous fat32 partition (WD mybook's are confirmed to all be working).

A benefit of NTFS is that there is no file size limit - so you can just load up unsplit ISO files or folder format games without any worry. But there is a hard 2tb limit due to the MBR requirement.

MBR/FAT32 allows that 8TB partition but now you have a 4gb file limit. For people who like to have as many games on-hand as possible, going for the 8tb drive + 1.5 internal drive for 9.5 TB total is the way to go. Simply download folder format games, use ps3iso tool to convert them into a split iso and put them in the "PS3ISO" folder on your external.
 

Ryccardo

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For some reason, the ps3 only plays nicely with MBR
Maybe because in 2006 (or 2005, since a product (before kickscammer) typically is engineered before it's sold) very few people used GPT, or even heard of it unless they actively read the Windows XP help :D
(Windows itself, with its arbitrary "can only boot from MBR on BIOS computers, only from GPT on EFI computers", was probably the biggest obstacle to the popularity of GPT)

MBR format drives as far as I know - and this limits your NTFS drives to 2 tb. However, certain drives can be MBR formatted and also have a humongous fat32 partition (WD mybook's are confirmed to all be working).
That's because MBR never had a 2 TB limit; however it has a 4 terasector limit for both start position and size of a partition, and most disks have 512 byte sectors (or "512e" 4096 byte sectors but they emulate 512).
Only in this decade "4KN" disks started coming out (as above, market availability is rather different from acceptability and widespreadness) where increasing a sector number by 1 will indeed go forward by 4 kB, of course breaking all the older/crappy software that assumed no disk will ever be made with a sector size different than 512

4 terasectors * 4096 bytes/sector actually gives a maximum of 16 TB, not 8 (though you may still be limited by the software involved, or even overzealous SATA to USB converters which enhance compatibility by emulating a 512e disk!)
 

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