SSD drive in an old PS3?

[spdfreak]

I have an old 80GB PS3 that I want to upgrade to a SSD to speed things up a bit. I mainly use it for BR discs and streaming stuff like Amazon Prime video. Seems to take a long time to buffer video and you can see and hear the HD while it looks like it is writing to it. If I pull the drive and clone it with Acronis, will I have any problems? I'll probably just get a cheap 256GB drive like the WD blue.

 

[Oyeve]

You will definitely see improvements but not as drastic as you would think as the PS3 uses an older SATA version. at 2-3x speed. Not sure if acronis will clone a PS3 drive tho. The PS3 has backup SW built into the OS.

 

[spdfreak]

You will definitely see improvements but not as drastic as you would think as the PS3 uses an older SATA version. at 2-3x speed. Not sure if acronis will clone a PS3 drive tho. The PS3 has backup SW built into the OS.

Thanks... so If I just put the new drive in with no OS and boot it up will it use built in FW to DL the latest OS version? I'm guessing the OS is some form of Linux? I can always just try the cloning and see if it works, not a big deal and I can always just stick the old drive back in if it doesn't.

 

[PattenTank]

For PS it will be a waste of an SSD. SSD works well for OS on a computer because it can fetch loads of small files scattered all over different areas of the hard drive. Due to the nature of how mechanical hard drives work. This is a major bottleneck on startups and launching apps.

On a PS you will be normally, loading large chunks of data in one sequence. The hard drive speed isn't a major bottleneck. The bottleneck on these purpose built machines are the CPU/RAM/GPU which are just enough to perfrm the tasks. .

 

[spdfreak]

I added a 120GB SSD to replace the 80GB OEM drive and it boots way, way faster. I really only use it for streaming Amazon Video, etc. not gaming. Everything is much faster- loading menus, etc.

 

[DSmithz]

I cant for the life of me get my old fat launch PS3 to recognize my SSD at all. My super slim detects it just fine and it works fine with a mechanical drive but nothing i do will make it recognize the SSD. Am i missing something or is it simply too old for an SSD?

 

[Fallen Kell]

I have a SSD in my 60GB launch edition PS3 and have not had any issues. That said the 60GB is a completely different hardware version from the 80GB (I.e. the 80GB removed the PS2 emotion engine chip and uses software to emulate that chip for PS2 backwards compatibility).

The only thing I can think of is perhaps the drive you are using is a modern block structure which isn’t compatible with the older system (I.e. it is 4K sector size disk perhaps). I don’t know if anyone has tested compatibility with things like 512n, 512e, and 4K drives in a PS3.

 

[spdfreak]

The only thing I read was that it had to be formatted FAT32. I used a relatively new HP S700 drive and didn't need to save anything, so I did a reinstall off a USB stick and it all went smoothly.

 

[lupi]

My 60gb version was too small for anything but OS updates, so I took a 500gb mechanical drive from a dead laptop and put it in. It automatically put the OS on the new drive and it looked like nothing had changed except i had more space.

 

[PattenTank]

I cant for the life of me get my old fat launch PS3 to recognize my SSD at all. My super slim detects it just fine and it works fine with a mechanical drive but nothing i do will make it recognize the SSD. Am i missing something or is it simply too old for an SSD?

It shoudl work, all PS3s have the same sata controllers, and are actually all SATAI (slowest). Maybe try to pre-format the SSD and put it in to see if does anything.