One of the more attractive features of the PlayStation 3 is that the hardware is designed to allow you to replace the hard drive with inexpensive, high-capacity models that work with laptops. Previously the only reason to upgrade was to get more storage space, but newer solid state disk (SSD) drives reportedly speed up the device.
A Eurogamer post compares the PS3 performance with a regular hard drive, an SSD drive and a hybrid, half-SSD drive. In many cases, the SSD drives cut down on loading times and generally improved system performance. Results varied depending on the games that were used.
Here’s a video guide that shows you how to swap out your PS3 hard drive:
Can SSD Upgrades Boost PS3 Performance? [Eurogamer via Kotaku]
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in my opinion, it’s not worth it. Wait until ps4 comes out with SSD
That’s the opinion that the Eurogamer post holds as well. There is some benefit to upgrading to a 7200 rpm drive, especially if you are desiring a larger hard drive, but right now, there don’t seem to be enough benefits to justify the costs on an SSD.
Nah, PS4 isn’t worth it. Wait until the PS38 comes out, it’s not worth the money until it can read your mind.
Just bought a PS3 a few weeks ago at a pawn shop for $130. I’m SO behind the times when it comes to technology. I even prefer my phones dumb with buttons.
I’m with you, I only bought one in November, well, basically because I wanted a Blueray player and to play skyrim.
Im with ya. I bought mine for the bluray and Afro Samurai. I do love how you can store music on it. I hooked my iPod up to mine and dumped all of my music to the PS3.
Damn right. Most phones nowadays can’t handle a drop.
The Brick phones from they 90′s can handle a drop, and more. The only way you can destroy one is by throwing it into mount Doom.
Did we rejoin the Gawker network when I wasn’t looking?
My PS3 would run even faster if it weren’t for the YLOD.
Poor ventilation ruined it.
My main concern is whether the PS3 even has TRIM support for solid state drives. If it doesn’t, the performance of any SSD you put in it is going to greatly decrease over time.
It doesn’t
The filesystem used by the PS3 does not require TRIM.
It doesn’t have to require it, in fact I don’t know of any that require it. TRIM is just something offered by SSD drives, basically they are MUCH faster if they know where the old deleted data is before you write on top of it (they require a real delete operation, disk drives can skip it and just write on top of the old data). If the file OS/filesystem doesn’t notify the drive with TRIM then the SSD is forced to preserve deleted data, this preservation of deleted data has a very large impact to the write speed of an SSD, with TRIM support the drive can look for spots that can be deleted without preserving data boosting the overall speed of the drive.
I used the wrong terminology I guess.
The PS3′s filesystem does not require TRIM because it doesn’t use free/deleted space the same way that other filesystems do.
I thought needing TRIM was strictly a hardware level thing where the data on the drive has to be written in larger chunks than can be read. So to write a partially filled block it has to read the block and write the whole thing. With TRIM it moves the full blocks together on idle so the drive deals with only completely empty blocks when writing. They way I’d heard it, thats independent of OS.
not that the PS3 NEEDS it, but that’s what Garbage Collection is for.
as long as you get an SSD that has good Idle auto garbage collection should not be an issue only old SSDs seems to degrade
Has this story been stuck in the queue for the last four years?
The Eurogamer article only saw a noticeable difference in massive texture games like Rage and Skyrim.
There was no discernible difference or very minor differences (outside of load times) for most other games. They specifically said “games like Rage are the exception rather than the norm”.
It certainly doesn’t make the PS3 “run faster”, though I suppose some people might really hate load times.
Since not all games copy files, let alone large ones, to the HDD in the first place, this doesn’t come as a big surprise.
I bet if you could hack a SSD so it would be accepted by a 360, you’d see a larger improvement since you can copy an entire game to the 360′s hard drive.
the bus on the PS3 is six years old and slow, doesn’t matter if you put a Ferrari logo on roast beef, it’s still not bacon.
Since when does Ferrarri make bacon? Awesome. Great to hear that they’ve dumped their automotive line for something more important.
You definitely won’t be maxing out the capability of the SSD, that’s for sure…
on the other hand, if you bought a PS3 4 or 5 years ago and have used it pretty regularly over the years and still have the stock hard drive installed, an argument could be made for getting a slight performance boost in addition to replacing a drive that may well have been on the verge of calling it quits anyway. It’s only a matter of time with those things.
Is this still consumerist.com?
Unfortunately, the performance boon from an SSD doesn’t show up very well on the PS3, especially on disc-based games. There is a performance gain, just not much over a 7200RPM drive.
I just added a larger HD (not ssd or 7200rpm because price and the improvement isn’t really noticeable). Anyways, to make a FAT32 partition, Windows partitioner will NOT allow partitions larger than 32gb, this is not a problem with FAT32, but windows simply removed this feature(Fat32 partition limit is actually almost 2tb). It is 100x easier to download a format utility(google guiformat), and create a new partition on your external HD to the size needed using windows(say 60 or 80gb) and then use guiformat to format that partition to FAT32. This will allow you to have a FAT32 partition whatever size you want, up to 2tb, in order to backup your current PS3 file size. (ps, if the PS3 tells you that you need 32gb space, this is actually false and you will need however much space is actually being used on your HD).