If you’ve got a PlayStation 3, then you surely know that its potential goes way beyond gaming. Unfortunately, loading up the system’s hard drive with music, pictures and videos can quickly eat up space required for game saves and new game downloads. And if you sprung for one of the cheaper 40GB models, you’ll find yourself meeting the brick wall sooner than later.
Thankfully, Sony was wise enough to make the PS3’s memory easy to upgrade using an off-the-shelf notebook drive. In this DIY installment, we explain how to back up your PS3’s data, replace the existing hard drive and restore your files onto the new one without losing any data or system settings.
Step 1:Back up your PS3 data on an external drive
Before you can replace the existing hard drive, you must back all of the drive’s data (all those music and picture files that eat up drive space) onto something else first. An external USB drive works best, but a USB flash drive or memory card will work too if you don’t have a lot of data to back up (and if that’s the case then you really don’t need a new hard drive).
I used an 80GB Maxtor OneTouch4 Mini USB drive (about $80) for the backup. To use an external drive you’ll need to format it first on a PC. Windows has a format utility, but it will only format the drive in the NTFS file system, which isn’t readable by the PS3. I used a free program called SwissKnife (http://www.compuapps.com/download/Swissknife/swissknife.htm) to format the Maxtor in the FAT32 file system. You’ll need to connect both the drive’s USB connectors to your PC (one USB port won’t provide enough power to the drive). Then open up Swissknife, identify the drive and format the entire drive in FAT32. The process takes a few minutes, after which you can connect the two USB connectors to two ports on the front of the PS3. The PS3 will recognize the drive right away.
Once the external drive is connected and recognized, the simplest way to move the PS3’s date onto it is to use the Backup/Restore utility of the PS3, which can be found on the System section of the console’s menu. That will back up everything, including game saves, downloaded movie trailers and all your music and pictures. I had about 20GBs on my PS3 and the backup process took 36 minutes. Don’t worry about your system settings—they’re saved in the console’s RAM and not on the hard drive.
Step 2: Open PS3 Drive Bay and Remove Drive
First, turn off the console, switch off the main power in the back and disconnect everything from the unit (including the external drive). The hard drive is located behind a plastic cover on the left side of the console. A small screwdriver will easily pry this off. Then use the Philips screwdriver to remove the blue screw from the drive. Flip the small wire tab and slide the drive tray to the right and pull it out of the bay.
Once removed from the console, you only need to remove the four screws securing the drive to the tray, and then pull out the old drive.
Step 3: Insert New Drive
The new drive will perfectly fit the tray of the old one. In my case I used a 2.5-inch Seagate Momentus 160GB SATA drive (under $100). Just place the new drive in the tray, replace the four retaining screws and carefully slide it back into the slot on the side of the PS3. Once in, slide the drive to the left to lock it in, flip the wire tab and replace the blue screw. Then replace the plastic cover. You’re almost done.
Step 4: Format
Once you reconnect all the wires and turn the unit on, it will instantly recognize the new drive and ask if you want to format it. Select OK. After formatting you’ll see that your system settings haven’t changed but there will be no data or game saves.
Step 5: Restore Data
The last step is the easiest. Simply plug both USB connectors of the external drive to the PS3 and go to the System menu and the Backup/Restore utility. From here, select restore and the Maxtor drive. All your data from the Maxtor drive will now be copied back onto the new internal drive in the correct places. In my case this step took about 30 minutes. When you’re finished you’ll see that everything is just as you remember it, except now you have a lot more room on your system for more stuff.
Don’t toss out the old drive. Hard drives do fail, and if the new one suddenly goes bad, all will not be lost if you still have the original drive.
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DIY: PlayStation 3 Hard Drive Upgrade
by Grant Clauser on January 1, 2008
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what about game demos? do they get backed up or do you have to redownload them? thanks.
You’ve over complicated this.
1. Buy an external hard drive bay.
2. take the old hard drive from your playstation 3 and install it into the hard drive bay, creating an external hard drive.
3. Install your new hard drive in your playstation 3.
4. Restore using your "new"external hard drive.
You might want to double check on just using your old PS3 HD as the external drive. Since you didn’t use the backup utility, it might not work when you try the Restore option for the new (and formatted) HD.
I’d recommend backing up your save games on a flash drive at the very least before attempting the transfer. Just in case.
my old 60gb ps3 burnt out but the hard drive’s fine just wondering how do i transfer my data onto my new ps3 is it possible to do this any other way i was unable to do a back due to old ps3 not working if any body can help please…
What if you buy a new PS3 and just want to transfer information from a friends ps3 to my new ps3? Is there any simple way to do this without an outrageous cost?
Hi, I just bought a new ps3 on ebay but it doesn’t come with a hard drive. I bought a hard drive for it though, after formatting it will it just work? Or will it be a problem since I don’t have the orginal drive? Thanks in advance for the help.
Cant I just back up the old ps3 hdd on to the new hdd? I cant understand backing up the files to a separate drive then to the new drive.
You shouldn’t call hard-disc space "memory" because it is not memory. It is usually referred to as "space".
HEY! thanks for the info! really helped but except for one small problem… i did EVERYTHING i didnt miss one guideline at all, now when i put in my HEAVY RAIN game, it re-installs, now im fine with that, but after it was done i realised NON of my save data was there??? so i went to look at SAVED DATA UTILITY, just to fined an empty folder! i dont mind replaying some games, but i have over 200 PS3 games. i would just like to know what happend or went wrong and how to get all my save data. if anyone could help please!!