What's the largest internal hard drive you can get for a PS3?

The Samsung M6 is a 500GB 2.5 inch drive and fits inside a PS3. As far as I know it's the only 500GB drive that will fit in - otherwise, it's a 320GB.

A 5400rpm is a better choice as they run cooler and 7200rpm doesn't do much for the PS3 anyway.
 
I heard PS3 hard drives run better with 5400 rpm drives is that true?

Well 5400 is the one thats is in there, some use a 7200 rpm but does not seem to be a huge improvement on speeds and may increase heat. As for size, well the biggest 2.5" sata 2 drive so thats a 500GB one, there is a few on here who run some kind of convertor thing and use a 3.5 sata drive thats sits in a Hd enclosure upto whatever they goto now lol.
 
that hard drive enclosure would mean it's external then? Is that for connecting via USB 2.0 to a PS3?

No, if you're cunning as a fox you can mod your PS3 to have a sata lead come out of the PS3s harddrive enclosure, then you can plug in any sata harddrive and use it externally. It will work exactly the same (well, slightly faster probably) than an internal laptop drive.
 
I have a 360GB one in mine but the usefullness runs out at about 320gb due to fat restrictions (old file format the ps3 uses) Its probably best to go 320gb internal and get an external 1TB usb drive for films etc. 7200 rpm drives are ever so slightly faster than 5400rpm ones, little more heat on the faster ones too, not really worth it tbh.
 
I have a 360GB one in mine but the usefullness runs out at about 320gb due to fat restrictions (old file format the ps3 uses) Its probably best to go 320gb internal and get an external 1TB usb drive for films etc. 7200 rpm drives are ever so slightly faster than 5400rpm ones, little more heat on the faster ones too, not really worth it tbh.

The PS3 doesn't use fat in its internal drive, it uses it's own proprietary drive format, USB drives are limited to fat32 however. Also, it's standard for harddrives to 'lose' some space when formatted, it's not a limitation of the PS3, it's just what happens; for example in my PC i have a 500gig NTFS harddrive that actually has 465gig of usable space. The best alternative is always to use the internal drive for films etc as the fat32 format used for USB drives has a file size limitation of around 4gig, any files larger than that can't be stored, whereas on my internal PS3 harddrive i have put files as large as 8gig on there without any issues.
 
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I thought the PS3's file system could cope quite easily with large files? I've copied a 7GB file onto mine with no problems at all.

The PS3 can't support NTFS on external drives so you're limited to FAT32 on an external drive which means a max of a 4GB file size.
 
Are you sure? on my 360gb i lost 40gb taking it down to about 320... Im pretty sure thats more than normal.

edit
just googled it and apparently no one knows, some are speculating it is an encrypted fat32 fs others say its a sony homegrown fs. Either way theyll probably never tell us due to fears of cracking the ps3
 
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Are you sure? on my 360gb i lost 40gb taking it down to about 320... Im pretty sure thats more than normal.

I imagine the PS3 reserves a chunk of it for things like firmware downloads, caching etc that it hides from the user hence the slightly larger loss than usual, but there isn't much in it. My 300gig drive in my PC is clocking in at just under 280gig so it isn't much more loss, especially considering the pc still counts unusable cache space whereas the ps3 hides it.
 
I have a 360GB one in mine but the usefullness runs out at about 320gb due to fat restrictions (old file format the ps3 uses) Its probably best to go 320gb internal and get an external 1TB usb drive for films etc. 7200 rpm drives are ever so slightly faster than 5400rpm ones, little more heat on the faster ones too, not really worth it tbh.

The large size difference is down to 2 things
1) Drive manufactures say that 360 gig is 360 x 1000 meg x 1000 K etc where as in fact 1 meg is 1024 K and 1 gig is 1024 meg and so on. So the actual storage size of the 360 gig drive is about 330 Gig.
2) The PS3 OS, some caching and system files ared store partially on the HDD that takes up the rest of the room and is a % of the available space on the drive eg it dont take up 20Gb on a 40Gb system.
 
I heard the new 80GB PS3 actually has only 64GB usable. Is that true?

The best 500GB internal drive 5400RPM i found to be used in a PS3 is £90 you know anywhere cheaper?

and for Streeteh:

The PS3 doesn't use fat in its internal drive, it uses it's own proprietary drive format, USB drives are limited to fat32 however. Also, it's standard for harddrives to 'lose' some space when formatted, it's not a limitation of the PS3, it's just what happens; for example in my PC i have a 500gig NTFS harddrive that actually has 465gig of usable space. The best alternative is always to use the internal drive for films etc as the fat32 format used for USB drives has a file size limitation of around 4gig, any files larger than that can't be stored, whereas on my internal PS3 harddrive i have put files as large as 8gig on there without any issues.

I have a FAT32 external USB 2.0 hard drive on my PC which is 500GB but usable 465GB i have had no problems playing back 1080p films which are 20-40GB in size. So what's this about 8GB limits?

EDIT: oops i made a mistake, sorry my PC external hard drive is NTFS
 
The PS3 reserves ~12% of the usable harddrive space, I have a 320GB drive, after formatting that leaves me with 298GB of usable space, after the PS3 reserves it's space that leaves ~268GB which sucks for a 320GB drive.

The PS3 does not have a file size limit (at least not an annoyingly low one), I copied a 8.4GB file with TVersity without problems to the PS3 as I could not use my external drive as it has a 4GB limit due to FAT32
 
The best 500GB internal drive 5400RPM i found to be used in a PS3 is £90 you know anywhere cheaper?

Be warned, as of right now the only 2.5 inch 500GB SATA drive that will fit in a PS3 is the Samsung M6. All the others are a little too tall so won't fit.
 
Be warned, as of right now the only 2.5 inch 500GB SATA drive that will fit in a PS3 is the Samsung M6. All the others are a little too tall so won't fit.
True, the drive must be 9.5mm tall, 400GB and 500GB drives are usually 12.5mm tall and do not fit.
 
Anyone using the M6? Tempted to get it over the WD 320Gb Caviar Blue...

Though I wont be using Play TV but with a few games supporting custom playlists I might copy over a load of music...

ps3ud0 :cool:
 
It looks like the new 500Gb WD Blue fits into the PS3 and is made of 2 platters - so would be pretty fast due to density...

Wonder what the 320Gb one is (2x160 I presume)

ps3ud0 :cool:
 
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