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Sony PS3 External Hard Drive vs. Internal and read, write speed

By: Daniel Chubb | February 14, 2008 | 12 Comments

Sony PS3 Hard Drive External vs Internal

With it being really easy to plug an external hard drive via USB into the Sony PS3, you should have no problems expanding the small storage space already on the Playstation 3, but what about read/write speeds.

Normally you cannot beat the performance of an internal hard drive, but then external hard drives are much more portable and easy to take with you just like my tiny 250GB hard drive that fits in a pocket.

What are your thoughts on Sony PS3 Hard Drives: External vs. Internal?

The guy in the video below makes a claim of the “World’s First 1TB PS3”, although I am not sure it really counts the same as an internal setup as he’s using an external drive.

If you want a full entertainment system with your PS3 you will need to expand your storage, but which way is better…external or internal?

Will the difference in disc read and write times really be noticed?

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  • OhBoy– AGAIN??

    An external HDD is superb to store Music, Images, DivX movies and other format movies,there are no noticeble performance issues at all, but I Think (not sure about this) you can’t install demos or PSN games, and game data to an external HDD, so the best configuration possible for a PS3 is a relative decent Internal HD (let’s say 200+Gigs will me more than enough for demos and game data and downloadable games) and an external HDD for all your multimedia files (size at your choice).

  • x

    You could always plug an eSata drive in through where the regular drive connects with a special cable and get external capacities with internal speed

  • http://www.amstunes.co.uk Usaryan

    External hard drives are a good idea even if only for video, music and photos. But the PS3 does not support NTFS file format and only FAT. For me this makes it close to useless as FAT32 does not support files over 4GB. Many of my files are in 1080p HD quility and though the PS3 supports the file format it does not support the NTFS file structure an so I cannot watch them from my eternal drive. I think Sony really needs to update the firmware to support NTFS file structure.

  • http://www.arcadeblender.com/blog jonjon01

    The PS3 is a great gaming and media console; as such, I have downloaded movie samples from the PS3 site to view on the HDTV.

    The quality of the demo movies in 1080 HD glory is great and I think a consideration needs to be made to the fact that the drive is spinning fast enough for the movie to be processed by the PS3 for output to your TV screen.

  • alex

    No moving picture icons for movies on external drives, compared to internal ones!

  • http://None Amjad

    Alex…Not really , using the in-video menu , you can manually create ICONS for the movie files.

  • alex

    @Amjad, Have you tried doing this for movies on an external drive (not the internal one)? If so, what file format are they in? I have not gotten this feature to work, for movies on an external hard drive.

  • debs

    when the ps3 first came out, i heard you could only plug a laptop external HDD, is that true? or does any external HDD works fine?

  • n00bsauce

    Okay b00ns listen up, buy a 500GB 2.5″ 7200rpm internal HDD and quit yer complaining. Why leave HDD door open with an eSata cable causing dust and lint to get inside your ps3??? Why bother with buying two HDDs one internal and external??? Why not just pony up $140 bucks and kill two birds with one stone!!!! Internal is the way to go!!!!

  • Raja Farhan

    I am getting this message on my ps3 “Cannot start the correct hard disk was not found” any ideas? It was working fine before. How can i fix it?

  • David

    Raja,

    I read on a different forum that someone got that message because his new hard drive had a higher default transfer rate than the PS3 could support. He had to contact the HD manufacturer for info on how to configure the HD for the lower transfer rate. Hope that helps (if you haven’t already solved your problem).

    David

  • suresh

    my lacie doesnt work with th ps3