PS3 HDD Upgrading Adventure: A Six Hour Tale

Sometimes in life you may want to keep an eye out for warning signs. Take my latest ill-conceived plot to update my launch window PS3 from its meager 60gb hard drive to a modest 500 giggle byte drive of today. I picked a hell of a week for this upgrade, but I would not be deterred; not by my nearly empty bank account, my limited free time or a system update that was apparently designed to thwart my single objective. No, I stood tall, credit card and screwdriver in hand with a will and by god when the dust settled, it was kind of good.

The easiest part of the upgrade was my purchase of a Western Digital 500gb drive from Amazon ($54.99, no tax or shipping). I got the drive the day after placing the order and it arrived with no fanfare or wasted packaging. I set out to complete the transfer that same night, but the most obvious obstacle would be finding a digital half way house for all of my save games and download content.

I ended up moving 300gb of data off of my backup drive which took two full hours. Once the drive was empty, I looked into formatting. For those of you not in the know about this techno voodoo, the PS3 doesn’t like drives that have been formatted with NTFS (a Microsoft patented format), so instead you can choose from either FAT or FAT32. Windows 7 only offered me NTFS or exFAT, so on the recommendation of a friend I downloaded a 96kb format utility called HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. Five minutes later I had a 120gb FAT32 drive, so I moved onto my PS3 which had been updated to 3.41 on the day of its release. Maybe you already know where I’m going with this?

As Sam has reported to y’all, firmware 3.41 has this one major pesky issue: if you are attempting to update your drive, the update process will get stuck in an endless loop of failure pie. However, since I’m a delinquent and I had no *cough* legal *cough* internet access at home I had to figure out a solution to get the updated 3.41 firmware that had just been released on the same afternoon my new shiny drive arrived at my doorstep.

I turned to my trusty cell phone. As it turns out my phone was more than capable of downloading the update from Sony’s Playstation Support site. The phone barked a warning about unsupported extensions, but I told it to shut its little mouth and download, damn it! At this point we’re at three hours and counting. Once I got the update hosted on my FAT32 drive, transferred to the PS3, the system updated and rebooted I felt as though I must be coming into the home stretch.

As it turns out, there are two viable data management options on the PS3. If you’re migrating all of your data from one machine to another, the system supports a direct transfer via Ethernet. For a drive replacement such as mine, though I needed to perform a full backup (which consisted  of 45gb). The backup process was painless, but time consuming. Once the backup to the temp drive was complete I was at four and a half hours. The final three steps were a nice relief from the monotony of half-watching progress bars inch across a distant screen as I got caught up on my Google Reader, Twitter, Nukezilla mail and (bleh) work mail.

I had a bit of a scrounge looking for a Phillips screwdriver that was small enough for the notebook HDD screws used to mount the drive on the PS3′s harness. I uttered a sigh of regret as I dusted off my 60gb little friend. He’d been so trustworthy through all of those annoying firmware updates, Home patches and mandatory cache installs. Hopefully my new drive will be as patient with Metal Gear Solid 4‘s promiscuous data swapping. Who am I kidding, I’ll never play that game again.

The rest of the process that required my input was complete in minutes. Upon startup with the new drive inserted, the PS3 asked if I wanted to format, formatted the drive, rebooted once more with one final (and unnecessary) format during the backup restore process. At that point it was 2:30am and my bed beckoned. In the morning I found that I indeed was the proud owner of a 500gb PS3, one that cost me $599.99 (plus tax, Jesus!) another fifty for the new drive and an entire evening of my life.

It was worth all it, I’m sure.