An Xbox360 or a Playstation 3?

[Sharingan]

Installing a larger HD will not void your warranty. In fact, the user's manual for the PS3 even includes instructions on how to replace the HDD.

The HDD used by the PS3 is any 2.5 inch HDD commonly available (none of that proprietary M$ crap). As far as I know, it's simply a case of removing a few screws, popping out the old drive, inserting the new drive, done.

I'm considering getting at least a 320GB drive soon. As Teho said, neither 40GB nor 80GB will last you very long, and, considering the PS3 is meant to be a media center for your living room, you'll want as much storage capacity as you can for the MP3s, videos and of course, the PSN games. Not to mention, more and more games nowadays come with a mandatory 5-6 GB install.

[Ghost]

So there isn't much reason to wait until a PS3 with a bigger hard disc coms out?

Damn, and me postponing it.

Well okay, getting it cheaper would be nice.

So what kind of hard discs should I look out for?

[Teho]

Any 2.5" SATA will do, the same standard that laptops use. I'd recommend getting one running at 5400rpm though. Faster ones shorten loadtimes a little bit yes, but they run very hot and will turn the otherwise quiet PS3 into a noisy system as the fans will be running constantly to keep it cool. And 5400rpm drives still load pretty fast.

[Ghost]

Big question is, should I get one now?

[Sharingan]

Depends on if there are any games out now that you really want to play. Personally, I'd wait a bit, not only for a possible price drop, but also because publishers tend to reserve their big titles for a year-end release (to take advantage of the Christmas effect).

[Demon Cleaner]

As Teho said, neither 40GB nor 80GB will last you very long, and, considering the PS3 is meant to be a media center for your living room, you'll want as much storage capacity as you can for the MP3s, videos...

But you can run a media center on the PC and stream it, that's the way I do it. I don't even know if you can copy music and video files to the PS3 disk?

[Teho]

You can, but not via direct transfer across the network. Or actually there is a way to do that by setting up a local server and using the PS3's web-browser, but there's no hassle-free way. But you can do it, via USB storage and such.

The HD can fill up pretty quickly just on games and PSN content though. I'm using about 80GB of mine now, a lot of that are downloaded trailers and such that I haven't deleted, but still.

Also once Sony gets their movie download service under way here I think some people's HDs will fill up quickly too.

[Ghost]

Hey Teho, how do you replace the hard disc?

[Teho]

Very easy. As Sharingan said, the instruction manual details how. It sits in a metal tray behind the panel on the left side of the console. The panel comes loose easily enough, and then you loosen one screw to get the tray out. The HD is secured to the tray by another four screws. So you simply loosen them, remove the old HD, put in the new, put the screws back in place, slide the tray back in and secure it with that one screw again. There's no cables to worry about, the tray fits only one way and aligns the HD with the connectors in there perfectly.

If you want to pre-format it it must be FAT32. The PS3 does not recognise NTFS disks. But it will format the new disk if necessary anyhow.

If you have used the old HD a bit there is a backup tool in the system menu. This will backup all gamedata, gamesaves and media you have stored on it to a separate location. I used an external USB harddrive for this. The tool warns you that it does not back up user-account data, but confusingly does not mention that the reason it does not back this up is because this data is not stored on the HD at all. Had me worried for a bit. The user data is stored at a separate location in the system, so nothing to worry about.

[Ghost]

What if I get a new hard disc with the PS3 and install it into the console before I have turned it on for the first time?