This guide will walk you through upgrading the internal hard drive of your PS3 or setting up an external hard drive. For upgrading your internal hard drive, read over the options below to determine which option best suits you.
Internal Hard Drive
File Backup/Restoration Methods
Manually Copying Files
This process is the cleanest and most straightforward method to restoring your data to a new hard drive. Essentially, you will determine what files and folders you'd like to save, and copy only those to your new hard drive.
Manually copying the PS3's HDD files can either be done with FTP, or if you have an eid_root_key dump, the Recovering Data guide.
A detailed guide on backing up the PS3's files can be found on this PDF file (also with a Polish translation) by PSX-Place member Berion.
System Backup Utility
This process will create a system back up file on an external hard drive, which you can restore to a new hard drive. If you have a NOR console (second generation fat or a slim), you will also need a second USB storage device to apply a firmware update of your current OFW/HFW/CFW.
- You will need:
- USB storage of equal or greater size than your original hard drive
- (For NOR consoles only) A second USB drive at least 256 MiB or larger to reinstall firmware
- This process will not save your trophies, so you will need to back them up if you want to preserve them. To do this, you can either use a PSN account, Apollo, MultiMAN's file manager, or an FTP session to navigate to
/dev_hdd0/home/and copy all the folders inside of it to a USB storage device or your PC. - Plug your FAT32 formatted USB storage device into your console.
- On your PS3, navigate to the Settings column and select System Settings → Backup Utility → Backup. After it is done backing up, remove your external storage device.
- Turn off your console, remove your old internal hard drive from the PS3, and insert your new hard drive.
- Start your console. If it is a NOR console, it will prompt you for a firmware update, at which point you will follow these instructions to re-install your firmware, using the same or higher firmware that your console is asking for.
- Navigate to the Settings column and down to System Settings → Backup Utility → Restore. Select your backup from your USB storage device and wait for it to complete.
- If you had backed up your trophies, use MultiMAN's file manager or an FTP session to navigate to /dev_hdd0/home/ and copy the folders back in, responding "Yes" when prompted to overwrite. After it is finished, shut down your console, boot into safe mode and run the option to Rebuild Database.
Installing a Blank SATA Drive
- Turn off your console, remove the old hard drive, and insert your new SATA drive. Afterward, turn your console on in order to format the hard drive.
- If it is a NOR console, your PS3 will prompt you to reinstall the firmware from USB, at which point you will follow the normal USB update installation instructions to complete it, ensuring that you install the same or newer CFW that you were on before swapping the hard drives.
- If it is a NAND (CECHA/B/C/E/G) or eMMC (CECH-4XXXA 'Super Slim') console, the PS3 will still boot into the XMB; all you have to do is accept the prompt to format the new HDD, no firmware reinstall required. eMMC consoles may also ask if you want to transfer any user data from the eMMC to the HDD.
Troubleshooting
- If the PS3 hangs at 100% at the formatting stage, try updating to a newer OFW/HFW/CFW on your old hard drive before trying again.
- If the PS3 doesn't seem to detect if a hard drive is attached, you may need to try it formatted as MBR (file system type shouldn't matter) in order to be recognized and formatted.
Notes on Drive Compatibility
- New internal SATA drives must be a 2.5" (9.5mm or shorter) drive in order to physically fit in the PS3's hard drive bay, and it must support 512 byte sectors. The maximum capacity supported for an internal SATA drive on the PS3 without any issues is 1 TiB.
- The PS3 can technically support up to 1.75 TB (1.5 TiB) SATA drives, but drives that have a capacity larger than 1 TiB on the PS3 will cause the console's file system recovery feature to be broken, so it's recommended not to use hard drives that are larger than 1 TiB unless you are an advanced user willing to take the risk.
- Generally, anything larger than 1 TiB will have issues even being detected on the later firmwares anyway, but there may be a higher rate of success for consoles detecting >1 TiB+ hard drives on 4.3x or older firmwares.
- Most consumer grade hard drives that are <=1 TiB will generally support 512 Byte sectors, so this is usually a factor you don't have to worry about.
- The PS3 can technically support up to 1.75 TB (1.5 TiB) SATA drives, but drives that have a capacity larger than 1 TiB on the PS3 will cause the console's file system recovery feature to be broken, so it's recommended not to use hard drives that are larger than 1 TiB unless you are an advanced user willing to take the risk.
- Your PS3 will reserve about 8% of the hard drive space as backup sectors and will be unusable for normal operation, but can be restored with xai_plugin (Evilnat CFW's settings) or this homebrew app.
- On top of this, the operating system will take up approximately 240 MB of additional space if it's a NOR console, since the NOR flash memory is too small to for it to be stored. This means that NOR consoles will emulate the /dev_flash/ partitions on the hard drive, rather than the console's flash memory.
- Since the PS3's HDD interface uses the SATA 1 specification (1.5 Gbps), the SATA drive will also need to have support for this specification.
- While pretty much any hard drive is backwards compatible with SATA 1 interfaces, a lot of solid state drive controllers aren't. Generally, a safe bet is to try an SSD that has DRAM built in, especially if it's an older SSD from before 2019.
- Many SSDs also only support 4 KB sector sizes, whereas the PS3 requires a drive that can use 512 Byte sized sectors. This can even be seen with some enterprise grade hard drives.
External Hard Drives
If you are using a new external drive, you will have to format it as one of the following:
- FAT32 (64KB): Use a PC to format your drive in FAT32, but select a 64 KB Cluster Size and MBR (not GPT) partition table. Windows 10/11 will not have the option to format drives as FAT32 if they are bigger than 32 GB, so you will need to use Rufus (set the format method as Non-bootable) or GUIFormat to do it. Keep in mind that moving files larger than 4 GB will require one of these methods.
- Disk Utility (macOS) and various Linux utilities (such as GParted) will also allow you to format drives up to 16 TB as FAT32, in their native 4 KB sector modes. However, Windows will not let you format drives as FAT32 if they're larger than 2 TB, even with third party formatting software.
- NTFS/exFAT: Drives beyond 2 TB are typically preferred to be formatted to NTFS or exFAT, but any drive with these file systems can only be used as an external drive on a PS3 through homebrew software. More information can be found on this page.
If you have issues with WebMAN recognizing your external hard drive, open WebMAN settings and set "Wait for any USB device to be ready" and "Wait additionally for each selected USB device to be read" to 5 seconds or more.