If you’ve been frequenting the forums here at Ready Up you may well have seen that I was considering upgrading my PS3’s 60gb hard disk to something a little more… capacious.
The patient under heavy sedation and awaiting transplant
I was inspired to do this partly by the irritating habit that many PS3 titles have of installing several gigabytes of data to your hard drive, and also by the astonishing ease by which you can actually change the hard drive. The PS3’s manual even tells you how to do it, and as it’s a standard 2.5″ laptop SATA drive you can get a good size drive cheaply. I paid about £70 including P&P for a 320gb drive, which compared to £80 for a 120gb Xbox 360 drive, works out pretty damn well in the PS3’s favour.
There’s no messing about with one time transfer cables either, all of your saves and settings can be output to an external USB drive and then restored with just a few button presses.
This bit was easier than riding the village bike
Being the cautious cat that I am, I even went over to smut-and-comedy website YouTube, and watched a couple of instructional videos explaining exactly how to perform this simple and painless transfer.
The one I watched started out like a recipe:
For this you will need:
- One small flathead screwdriver
- One small crosshead screwdriver
- One new hard drive.
I watched the video. It couldn’t be easier – you gently prise off one piece of plastic, undo five screws, slide the drive in, screw it all back together and slot the plastic cover back on. Job done, in less than a minute.
What they meant to say was this:
You will need:
- One small flathead screwdriver
- Fifteen different crosshead screwdrivers as none of the ones you have will fit exactly
- The patience of a saint
- Very strong hands
- A large pair of pliers
- A massive vocabulary of swearwords
- Understanding neighbours (see point 6)
- About 45 minutes of your time
It really was ridiculous. I’ve often admired the PS3’s design and the clever engineering that keeps it so quiet and cool during prolonged running periods, but never did I expect Sony to have come up with something so amazingly, so spectacularly ludicrously against the laws of physics. Where else but inside a PS3 can you find five screws so tightly screwed in that you need the force of twenty seven Hiroshima bombs to turn them? This wouldn’t be that astonishing until you consider the fact that these screws are made from a metal which is softer than well-chewed chewing gum, and yet somehow they just will not budge.
And now you are screwed…
Of course, once you get past the shockingly frustrating first screw, to the point where you are trying to unscrew the drive from the little metal tray it sits on in the PS3, you have to be really careful how you hold it. Squeeze it too hard on the top and it’s game over for your original drive, and yet to get the screws out you need to hold it in a vice-like death grip whilst you swear, grunt and stab at the screws haphazardly with a screwdriver.
Of the five screws I only managed to get two of them out using the traditional implement – the other three had to come out with pliers after I utterly destroyed the head of the screw. I swore so much that a sailor who had spent his entire life sailing around in a hospital ship full of other sailors with Tourette’s would have been offended.
Still, by some miracle I eventually got the job done and I now have a whacking great hard disc ready for me to squander on endless downloads and game installs, so at least my aching fingers have some consolation. Plus the restore process worked flawlessly, you wouldn’t know it was a new drive.
When you finally get that screw out there are four more. FOUR!
All this really reminded me of why I stopped buying PCs, I was fed up with messing about with installing new hardware and drivers and all that nonsense. In fact, it was exactly that kind of thing that led me to playing games on consoles on the first place.
Whereas I admit I didn’t have to perform this particular task, it has got me wondering if we’re going a bit full circle now with our games consoles. PS3s and Xbox 360s are out there today supporting keyboards, mice, hard drive upgrades, headsets and cameras as well as trying to be your video and music players. The PS3 even runs Linux. A penguin too far from the original point of the games console, perhaps?
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