Remember the first version of the PS3 we saw? It has a gazillion input ports for Firewire, USB, and even an internal coffee grinder. Naturally costs have to come down and dreams must be crushed, so all but half of those extrasensory ports went away in the final production.

As a result, the announcement of the eSATA mod earlier this month seemed ironic to me, if not awkward. Game Watch purchased the mysterious device and has a step-by-step photo journal of the installation process, which we've translated poorly in the story below. It's ugly as sin but get the job done.

This is the photo of the kit. It looks very medical and non inspiring. I've purchased hypodermic needles from 13 year old dealers with better packaging. This baggy contains the SATA controller bay and the new side panel with the port holes cut out, as shown in the somehow even less exciting photo that follows.

This may remind you of that old floppy drive you keep in a drawer. Dude. You're never going to need it again. Just throw it away already. Don't look back.

Also shown here is somebody else's external SATA hard drive kit. Game Watch used both to test the product and prove wether or not it was just a paperweight. The drive is styled to look like PS2 hardware, but instead it just looks like the packaging you throw away when you buy IBM mainframes. (That's a sysadmin failed sector Raid hard drive joke, because back in 95' ... oh, nevermind.)

Installation is easy: rip out your old drive, slide this one in. When you photograph yourself doing this make sure your hard drive is close by and watching you poke at with your fingers so everyone understands what's going on when they skim down the page and don't read your little funny paragraphs. 

Last but not least, install your hard drive into the external bay and format it to FAT on your PC, then come back to the PS3 for insertion into the womb. The recommended drive is a Seagate Baracuda.

Ugly as hell, but you pirate kiddies will be all over it, I'm sure. Bet you can't wait to put your whole Naruto collection on it, can't you? Here's what you'll see if it was done correctly.  Never mind that new rumored 120GB Xbox 360 -- here's a 300GB PS3!  There are less hackish ways to accomplish this, but this one is perhaps the most safe and simple and safe to execute.

Obviously there is no guarantee Sony will support this functionality with future patches of the hardware, so go at it at your own risk.

Buyakasha.