GameInformer

i want to switch my hard drive with a  Western Digital 500GB Scorpio Blue Sata 5400RPM 8MB Internal Laptop Hard Drive  is that the best quality one? i don'twant to get some pile and have it burn out after a week. and can i back up my old data onto my laptop?and if not what would be best? i don't want to have to buy a portable hard drive just to back up my data considering there around $70. thanks!

i'm not sure that the laptop hard drive will work, but you can buy 1TB internal hard drive for 100 bucks and fit that in and done with it

5400rpms isn't the fastest but 7400rpm isn't tremendously better either... 8mb cache is standard, size of drive is an opinion, and western digital makes good hard drives so as long as you buy from somewhere reputable its good...and umm.. honestly only way you can transfer is to either burn ALL of the info onto discs, flashdrives, or need some somewhat complicated and expensive one time use device.. you could just go a small computer store and get them to copy it over for ya' can't imagine them charging much at all, and maybe even nothing at all if you buy something. PLEASE,PLEASE just don't go to geek squad though...

then again...on ebay... for like $15 bucks i saw an attachment that turned hardrives into external hard drives... they're they exact same thing really, one just comes with a caddy and the other comes with a glossy glove and a usb transfer.. not sure how much they cost now so i'll look it up for ya'..one sec....cheapest i saw was $20 after shipping...and hey atleast it wouldn't got to waste...

cgi.ebay.com/INTERNAL-TO-EXTERNAL-IDE-HARD-2-5-3-5-DRIVE-KIT-USB_W0QQitemZ290393881915QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0

lol RETRACTION not how reliable this is but $4 and a 99% rating seems good

http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-2-0-to-IDE-2-5-3-5-5-25-hard-disk-drive-HDD-Cable_W0QQitemZ250510293952QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item3a5393bbc0

I personally didn't keep up on it, but I thought a recent patch included some sort of hard drive transfer utility?

Thank you all for your help! i think any 2.5" hard drive will work, im gonna try the computer store idea that shound much cheaper and less aggravating .(EYROS) the ps3 does have a backup utility if thats what you ment.

glad to have helped...

I’ve finally done it I got a 500 GB hard drive which installed easy as pie. It’s odd though because it says I only have 465 GB all together (which I knew was gonna happen) it reads at like 1025 MB instead of 1000 MB which makes the difference. The odd part is that it says I only have 413 free space before I restored anything.  So does anybody have any idea what may have happened to the other 50 or so GB that is gone off a new never used clean drive?  

System function data ? I noticed the same thing on my laptop and Xbox , and that's what I figured it was .

The PS3 always reserves a fixed percentage of HDD space for system data, around 10% of the HDD in use.

Are there now Terabyte HDD that fit the PS3 slim? I recall reading an article that they were a couple of millimeters off...

And what does the back up utility do? Do you need an external disk to place the backed up files on to?

when i looked the biggest i could find that would fit in the ps3 was 500 GB , it needs to be a 2.5 inch SATA. the backup utility backsup all the data onto a portable hard drive, but it has to be big enough to fit all your data and in FAT32 format. i could not get a big enough drive so i backed all my saves (not data) onto a 8GB memory stick. and reinstalled the data after i put the drive in the PS3. hope that helps!

Couldn't you have just reformatted a NTFS HDD to FAT32 with your computer, then use it to store data from your PS3?

Grab a WD drive and make sure you have an external to back up your old stuff  once you do that its a sinch.  Upgraded my 80 to a 320