PS3 change HD

[Tiago]

Hi,
anyone did change the internal HD for a bigger one?
Mine is 120 GB, and i am getting difficulties to work with it. I need a bigger one.
Someone told me that if you remove your HD and later try to put it back (same HD) in PS3, he will try to format it????
Can't i have 2 HDs both setup with games, and swap them if i need?

[Harrison]

I do know that Teho has upgraded the HDD in his PS3, so hopefully he will know. There is the facility built into the PS3 firmware to backup the HDD to an external drive, which you could use before upgrading the drive. I don't think it was designed with the idea to swap between drives, as the PS3 uses its internal HDD a bit like Windows uses its boot drive.

[Demon Cleaner]

I changed mine to a 300GB one, it's pretty straight forward, you can also find guides online. Don't know for the whole swapping thing, though I don't think that it is possible to swap disks like you wanna do, but why don't you use external disks, as your PS3 is on CFW?

[Tiago]

I find internal HD more stable then External HD. My External HD in CFW for 3 times crashed, with black screens over the last weeks, one of the times it crashed while was saving the game state... the result? currupted data on save game, i had to start the game from zero. There are some games where you cannot backup the save data to USB PEN (Heavy rain) is one of them. I now backup the save directory with ftp server. So, with internal HD, with the same software (most recent software) i never had any problem... anyway, 120GB is not much, so i need a new one, but, i may need to keep the old one with different software, and i would like to know if sometime i will want to put the old HD if it will work, or if i will be forced to format it.

[Teho]

I can only join in with saying I have no idea if swapping between two or several HDs will work. The process of taking a backup and installing a new HD is pretty straightforward as mentioned though. The only hitch I had was with the backup tool; it informed it would not backup account info and such, only gamedata and media. So I thought I'd have to re-enter account info and set all the various system settings all over again, which it turned out I didn't. All this information was retained even though the system claimed it wasn't backed up, which I guessed had to be because it was stored elsewhere on the system and not on the HD. I never looked up if that is really the case though. But if it is then I at least can't see why it shouldn't be possible to change between different HDs like you want to. But I really have no idea.