How To Get The Most Out Of Your Playstation 3 (PS3) Part 3 – How To Upgrade Your PS3’s Hard Drive

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Playstation 3 (PS3)

Part 1 – File Sharing with Windows Media Player 11

Part 2 – Adding External Storage

It doesn’t matter if you have the 20GB, 60GB, or even the new 80GB PlayStation 3 — you can always use more storage space. All that available hard-disk space quickly disappears once you start downloading games, demos, and HD videos. Fortunately, Sony has designed the PS3 to allow console owners to perform their own hard-drive upgrades. You can go out and select your own hard drive instead of being forced to buy an official first-party hard-disk accessory. However, giving console owners that freedom means that aspiring upgraders will need to know how to select the right hard-drive upgrade and the proper installation technique.

Hard-disk manufacturer Seagate supplied us with a 160GB Momentus 5400.3 for our upgrade.

The first step to replacing the hard disk is going to the store or visiting an online retailer to pick up a new hard disk. The PS3 is compatible with just about any 2.5-inch SATA notebook hard disk. Both 5400-RPM and 7200-RPM drives should work fine. The physical size of the hard disk is important because it has to fit the PS3’s 2.5-inch drive tray. As far as storage capacity goes, it doesn’t make sense to go through the trouble of upgrading unless you go big: We’re talking 120GB, 160GB, or even 250GB.

Once you have your upgrade drive, the next step is to back up the data on your current PS3 hard drive to an external storage unit. You can skip this step if you aren’t attached to your music, videos, and game saves, but most of us will probably want to save all that information. The PS3 has a built-in software backup utility that can copy the PS3’s hard-drive contents to an external storage device, such as a USB thumb drive or a memory stick. The removable storage device must use the FAT32 file system in order for the PS3 to recognise it. If you have an external hard drive that’s formatted in NTFS, you can use the Disk Management utility in Windows to reformat the drive, but you’ll need to create partitions on large external hard drives because Windows can only do FAT32 on drives 32GB or smaller.

Save your data using the PS3’s backup utility.

If your storage device isn’t large enough to handle a full system backup, you can selectively copy data over through the various music, photo, and game menus in the XMB. Your PlayStation Network login and system settings will remain safe on the system during the entire process. After you have your data safely backed up, you can move on to the actual hard-drive swap.

You will need a Phillips-head screwdriver to complete this part of the installation process. The PS3 owner’s manual also includes step-by-step details on how to replace the hard drive, in case you need more instructions.

Turn off and unplug the system. Remove the plastic HD side-panel, and remove the blue screw.

Open the metal latch, move the drive tray to the right, and slide out the drive.

Remove the four screws that hold the hard drive to the tray. Use a screwdriver that fits snugly because the screws are extremely tight and easy to strip.

Swap in the new drive, and replace the screws.

Put the drive tray back into the system and slide it into place. Then replace the blue screw and snap the side panel back onto the system.

Turn on the console and let the system format the new drive. Then load up the PS3 backup utility to restore data from your external storage device back onto the PS3 hard drive.

At this point you should have a newly upgraded PS3 and the leftover hard drive. You could try selling the old drive, but small-capacity used drives might not fetch enough money to be worth the hassle of finding a buyer. If you still want to make the drive useful, you can buy an external drive enclosure to make it into a portable storage device.

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Playstation 3 (PS3) Part 2 – Adding External Storage

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Playstation 3 (PS3)

Part 1 – File Sharing with Windows Media Player 11

Part 3 – How To Upgrade Your PS3’s Hard Drive

The Playstation 3 is available with several different hard drive sizes, but quite often you may want or need a bigger one. You can replace the internal hard drive using a standard laptop hard drive, but this tends to be expensive. An easier and cheaper method is to add an external hard drive to your Playstation.

1. Connect the hard drive to your computer using a USB cord.
2. Check what the drives  "File System" type is by going to Start, Computer, Right click on the USB drive, and select Properties.
3. The file system type must be "FAT32" in order for the Playstation 3 to recognize it. If it is a different format please read this article explain how to format a large USB drive.  
4. Once you have confirmed the file format you need to create a folder system identical to that on the Playstation 3.
5. Please create four folders labelled "Picture" (not Photo), "Music", "Video" and "Game".
6. Load all the music you want into your music folder, all the video you want into your video folder, and all the photos you want into your picture folder. Your game folder should still be empty.
7. Disconnect the hard drive by clicking the green arrow in the icon list and the bottom right hand corner of the screen and select "Safely remove…"
8. Once your computer tells you "XXX drive can now be safely removed", unplug the hard drive from your computer.
9. Connect the hard drive to your Playstation 3 and use the extra space to save information and access all your extra content saved on your external hard drive.

 

Tips

Alternatively to the "prebuilt" folder system, you can press triangle on your hard drive and click "Display All", but you still need to select Video to see video files.

Folder system works as follows – Dir/files* or Dir/folder/files – example: Video/files* or Video/Home Movies/files* – Dir/folder/folder/files doesn’t work without "Display All" explained above – example: Video/TV Shows/Simpson’s/files*

You can copy files to and from HDD & PS3 but you cannot edit files/folders on the HDD from the PS3 – you must copy to PS3 or do it from your computer.

If you lay your Playstation horizontally, do not place the external hard drive on the right side where the exhaust fans are aimed. The air coming out of the Playstation is very hot and will cause your external hard drive to malfunction.

DO NOT PLAY WITH YOUR PS3 VERTICALLY! IT WILL SLOWLY RUIN THE LASER READER AND WILL NO LONGER RECOGNIZE ANY DISCS YOU PUT INSIDE…

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Playstation 3 (PS3) Part 1 – File Sharing with Windows Media Player 11

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Playstation 3 (PS3)

Part 2 – Adding External Storage

Part 3 – How To Upgrade Your PS3’s Hard Drive

The PlayStation 3 is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment and successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles. It is the first console with next-gen primary storage media, Blu-ray Disc, though it also supports DVDs, CDs, and with some models SACDs. It is capable of playing back content from Blu-ray Disc (BD) at a bit rate of multiplex 48Mbps, the maximum bit rate defined in BD standards. (Wikipedia)

I checked out the official PlayStation.com forums and I’ve seen some pretty useful info on how to allow media sharing between the PS3 and Windows Media Player 11.

Here is what I had to do with my set up. Some of this was necessary as my External Western Digital HDD is FAT32 at the moment, and without doing the below, the PS3 wouldn’t see the content stored on my FAT32 drive. NTFS drives were fine, just not other HDD formats.

STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS:
Follow these instructions exactly and you should have no problems.

Before you begin:
1. Ensure your firewall is set up properly. Your software firewall must have the necessary changes to allow Windows Media Player to communicate out for UuNP. If you use Windows Firewall and enable sharing for WMP, WMP will make the necessary changes to Windows Firewall. If you use another 3rd party Firewall, like McAfee, you will probably need to go in to that software and add the right stuff, such as Programs that can communicate out on the network or trusted IP’s, etc.
2. Ensure your PS3 and Computer are within the same IP address range and subnet mask, so they can talk to one another. In other words allowing your computer and PS3, to obtain it’s information from the DHCP (Firewall router).

On Your PS3:
1. Disable Media Server Connection on the PS3.

On your PC, in Windows Media Player 11:
ENSURE YOU HAVE ALL THE NECCESARY PLUG-INS AND CODECS FOR WMP TO VIEW ALL TYPES OF MEDIA, LIKE AVI, QUICKTIME, ETC.
1. Install Windows Media Player 11 (unless it’s installed already).
2. In services.msc or “Computer Management”, Change the account that Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service uses. Changed it to “Local System account”, but leave “Allow service to interact with desktop” UNCHECKED. Restart this service. This was necessary to be able to add folders from my FAT32 External Western Digital HDD.
3. Click on Options
4. Click on Library
5. Click on Configure Sharing and then check mark “Share my media to:
6. Click on Settings
7. Put in something you want for share media as, and leave the default settings.
8. DO NOT click the “Allow new devices and computers automatically”. Check marking this will allow everything to connect without you knowing and approving.
9. Click on OK to get back to the main properties screen.
10. Click the “Monitor Folders” button.
11. Once that is up, depending upon how you have your computer set up, and how many user profiles you have choose your options.
12. For me, since all my media is in different places other than my profile in “Documents and Settings”, I did an add and ADDED the folders I wanted to add to the library.
13. Let WMP build the library up, and let it completely finish.
14. Click OK on everything till you get back to WMP.
15. Verify your library.

On your PS3:
1. Enable Media Server Connection on the PS3.

On your PC:
1. Once you sit down, you might have a pop up, if you left WMP running, to allow an unknown device access. You can verify your PS3 by checking the MAC address. WMP does not support the PS3 yet, so it will be seen as an unknown device.

If NOT……
1. Click on Options
2. Click on Library
3. Click on Configure Sharing and if things worked properly, you should see an “Unknown Device” Icon.
4. Highlight the Icon and do “allow”, and do what ever else you feel necessary, such as customize, or right click the Icon for additional properties.

On your PS3:
2. Go to each Media choice in the XMB (Pictures, Music, Video), and under each do a “Search for a Media Server.”
3. Once it has found a Media Server for each choice, you should then be able to see your PC show up with the funky “Windows ICON” and the name of the WMP share you created.

You should be able to take it from there. I used the above steps, and my PS3 is now getting tons of content from my PC. With the exception of a few formats, such as AVI and Quicktime. Some of my choices above were to ensure that my computer is still locked down and secure. If you choose certain settings, you’ll just open up your computer to vulnerabilities.

Feel free to comment on this collection of tips, mentioning if they worked for you or if you’ve experienced issues.