Takes nearly no time at all. It just goes in a HD carrier that slides into place. A screwdriver is all you need as far as I remember. It requires a format if I remember correctly.

Yeah you need to reformat it. I have a PS3 and I don't think I'll ever need anything greater than the 80 gig drive. Unless I ever get into animal porn and I become so obsessive that I need to store all of it on the hard drive of the PS3.

If it was any easier to install the hard drive you could just shove it right into the PS3 and it would absorb it.

-upgraded to a 160gb seagate 5400rpm sata150 drive

-installation was cake, unscrew a screw, pull drive out, remove cage, put on new drive, format via ps3 and restore backedup data from ext; good to go! all done in under 20 mins

-pc knowledge: uber geek; i like to take things apart or like the thinkgeek shirt i wear, 'i void warranties' hehe..

@ BS3 Owner

You have 52 games for the PS3? Do you have repeats because I've never even seen half of that at my local Best Buy.

if you know how to drive a car, you should be competent enough, take out screw, pull, push, put in screw. Just buy the right drive.

@Vexed, you'd be surprised, but yeah, the stores don't carry them all, not even game stores. Wal-mart has a lot though. And I think he's counting PSN games.

yeah it's always a clusterfuck over there, and you have to push past little pissypants kids and their hot moms. Goddamn milfs and their money tits.

........
I have been a proponent of ps3 self upgrading hdd's from day one. had the 20 gigs not been totally sold out I wouldve gotten one, however, since my ps3 gets used about as often as my left hand for masturbation (rarely) I haven't filled up my 60 gig just yet.
one day when I decide to reformat my comp hdd and transfer all my movies and music to my ps3 media hub I will probably get a nice 120 gig laptop hdd. time will tell...

also upgrading is as simple as unscrew a few screws, change hdd's and rescrew it in, followed by reformatting which is automatically prompted.
I reccomend leaving a bit for linux if anyone does reformat. its pretty cool having a basic computer to use at the sofa.
especially with a wireless K&M
360's need self upgradable hdd's so bad its a joke... but its got the games so I'll just eat my complaints while sucking off the massive microsoft tits.

In the next year, I'm going to try and hunt down a 60GB unit because of backwards compatibility. Once I get it, I'll likely upgrade its HDD to the biggest one I can afford.

Did they use laptop drives in the ps3 just to make it smaller, if they did in that case...it didnt appear to work.

Well, considering my 60 GB PS3 (whose hard drive only has, like, fifty-five usable GB of space in all) has over 30 GB of free space, I won’t have to worry about this for a while, even if Devil May Cry 4 loads 5 GB of data onto the drive. But it’s great that Sony allows (and even suggests) this, and I’ll be sure to take advantage of it if I ever need to upgrade.

That's efficient, but I don't really care.

@seamonkey420: Why would you use a 5400 RPM drive instead of 7200?

The PS3 hard drive upgrade sounds about the same as the average HDD installation in a laptop.

They're probably desperate for selling points now. I'll never use more than the 40gb on mine, since i've got a 1TB media PC sitting right next to it on my shelf.

Does it void your warrenty? The ps2 was void as soon as you opened it.

I just got the 40 gig on not 3 days ago and only have 25 gigs free with 3 games. :\

I am tempted to do it some day.

I did see that method of using a regular 3.5 Inch SATA drive instead of the 2.5 Inch notebook sized drive that the PS3 uses.
The largest possible drive is nearly 1 TB (or something close to that). I guess all you'd have to do then would to put the drive in a caddy and there'd be more than enough space for all those 1080 films. Hell I'd even mold some black plastic into a PS3 shape and use that as the caddy. But then I'm probably too lazy to do that.

@glitched

thanks for noticing that! i didn't even know there was a difference between laptop and desktop harddrives... up until now i've only heard "2.5 inch" hard drive, but this is the first time i've heard of 3.5 inch... had you not told me i probably would have went ahead and ordered one of those in a month or two after they got another price drop... so i'm guessing the 2.5 inch ones are more expensive?

@thisissami: Yeah, the 2.5" (“notebook”) drives are significantly more expensive than their one-inch-larger (“desktop”) counterparts. For example, on Newegg.com, you can get 500 GB of space on a 7200 RPM 3.5" internal hard drive for $105. But $110 in the laptop hard drives section only gets you 120 GB at 7200 RPM. (Both are SATA drives, of course; that’s the connection that the PS3 uses.)

*cjpkiller: "its pointless to go larger since the ps3 wont write to the disk that fast, the drive it comes with is 5400 rpm."

Can you provide a reference for that? I seriously doubt there would be some intentional throttling of the SATA interface.

Of course, the 60GB drive I have is big enough for me. Yay for the "real" PS3. :)

Cool.