I’ve already downloaded two games and was thinking about buying a bunch of PS network games all at once. Is there anyway to tell how much memory my PS3 has left?
Settings/ System Settings/ System Information
and if you find you’re running short, you can swap the hard drive with any 2.5" laptop SATA drive. I put a 500 GB drive in mine.
How difficult is this for your average user?
Warning: If you do this wrong, you will lose your saves (well, I guess not lose them, they’ll still be on the old HD.)
There are three ways to transfer data to a new PS3 harddrive.
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Backup your saves to a USB thumb drive or external HD (has to be newly FAT32 formatted, don’t have any other data on it), and then transfer them back after you install the new hard drive. Make sure to “sign in” with your PSN account first, or else certain saves, called “protected-saves”( unique to your PSN ID) won’t get transferred.
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Use the PS3 backup tool. THIS REQUIRES A SECOND PS3. You take the new harddrive, put it in the second PS3, then connect them with an ethernet cable, and go to the first PS3 and have it back-up to the second. When it’s done you then take the HD from the second PS3 and put it in thge first, and put the original HD from that second PS3 back in it. This copies EVERYTHING. The advantage here is that it will copy all data, like downloaded and installed games. The first option only transfers saves, you’d have to redownload and reinstall all your games.
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Use PS+. If you’re signed up for PS+, you can transfer all your saves to “the cloud.” Do this, then after you sign in with the new HD installed, just download your saves from the cloud. Like the first option, this will require you to redownload and reinstall all your games.
Not very. It’s one screw to slide it out of the PS3. There are very easy to follow tutorials and videos online. The PS3 was designed for the HD to be user-upgradable.