Rather than review. I thought I'd provide the audience with a lesson to learn for PS3 owners. Something that Sony has advertised over for the XBOX 360 since its launch is the ability to replace the hard drive. They didn't so much advertise it, but it was certainly a well known feature, along with the late ability to install Linux. While Microsoft puts 2.5" hard drives into a proprietary enclosure and releases higher capacities through bundles before selling them individually, the PS3 mounts the bare drives into a bracked and slides them in through an easily accessible bay on the side of the console. Of course, much like Microsoft, Sony has released several SKUs since its launch in 2006. As it stood, it was just a superfluous feature that few people utilized. I bought a launch model with a 60GB drive, and it was time to upgrade.

Note: While all PS3s have this ability, the hard drive tray varies from hardware wave to wave. The one depicted here, as with the Phat 60GB model, slides before pulling out. Other models slide directly in. Regardless, all models use a tray of some sort and the backup/restore process is all the same.

The great thing about the console is that it uses a standard SATA 2.5" (laptop) hard drive, one that you can buy off Newegg or anywhere else. In fact, I was able to get a 500GB drive for $50 (that's good for a laptop drive). The only issue that many owners may not realize is that the PS3 only supports FAT, so you won't be able to upgrade it to 2TB+ drives should they ever come out. Really, this limitation only affects the use of removable media such as USB drives; it won't read NTFS used by Windows now. Regardless, 500GB is fantastic and gives you plenty of room to grow. The backup utility is rather slow during both backing up and restoring, but it's forgivable. You can back up individual files to a flash drive, but if you want to back up the entire drive, including game installs, you'll want to use a larger external drive. The problem is, Windows won't allow you to format large partitions as FAT by default. I had to use SwissKnife, an abandoned partition manager that does the job. For simplicity's sake, I took my 250GB external drive (a WD Passport) and just made a 60GB FAT partition, since that's how big my original PS3 drive was anyway.

What isn't well known is that the screws that hold the drive into the try are small, tight and soft. If you're not careful, you can easily strip these screws and reduce the chance of separating them. I was able to get three off without issue, but I just happened to strip one. They're too small to grab with needle nose pliers and the round, shallow edge makes them impossible to wrench. There it is. Between a rock and a hard place when all you want to do is replace a hard drive. This is where we get into Sony's support for this issue. After poring over forum threads regarding this very issue, I found that originally, Sony was unofficially providing replacement trays, either for free or cost. Wonderful! It's not technically supporting the modification of the console, but provides owners with a harmless component that really doesn't cost them anything. Unfortunately, Playstation support was unable to provide any support whatsoever, since they just replace HDMI cables. That's what they told me. I was forced to resort to eBay, where I found a single person selling trays for $6. It was steep for just a piece of metal, but when it's your only option, you can't complain. Sob story aside, once I got the new tray, the new drive went it without any trouble. The console recognizes the unformatted drive and prompts you to format. Once that's done, you use the utility to restore data, then enjoy the new drive.

Let this be a lesson to all thos PS3 owners out there. If you buy a new PS3, you've probably got a nice 250GB drive to store all your stuff on, but for Phat owners, this is definitely crucial information. Back up your data when you begin considering, then confirm that you can remove the drive from the tray.