Video:How to Upgrade a Playstation 3 Hard Drive

Transcript:How to Upgrade a Playstation 3 Hard Drive

Hi, I'm Andy Ramsey for About.com.

Before Upgrading a Playstation 3 Hard Drive

And if you were an early adopter of the PS3 like I was, you may have one of the old hard drives-maybe the 40, 60 or 80GB versions. If you're going to upgrade your Playstation's hard drive, the first thing you'll need to do is back up the data that's currently on your PlayStation. And, to do that, you'll need an external storage device like this USB hard drive. And Sony added a very easy to use backup utility from their main menu. And to get there, simply go to System Settings, then to the Backup Utility, click "Backup" and you select the USB device that you just plugged in.

Replacing the Playstion 3 Hard Drive

So the next step is to actually get in there and replace the old hard drive with the new one. So what you want to do is turn off your PlayStation and unplug everything from the PlayStation 3, including the power supply.

At the bottom of the Playstation, if you look here, it says "Detach this cover when replacing the hard disk." And, of course, that's the cover you'll want to remove. But first you're going to need a couple of supplies. You'll need a relatively small Phillips head screwdriver and your new hard drive. What's most important about it is that it's a laptop hard drive with a 2.5" profile. It's the only size that will fit in the PlasyStation.

Once you have everything unplugged, all you need to do is remove this little tab here by getting your fingernail in there and it pulls right out. Next, remove this blue screw with the arrow with the arrow pointing to it. Once you've removed the screw, pull out the little metal tab here, move it to the right and you can see the hard drive comes out easily. Next, you need to remove these 4 screws. And make sure to use a screwdriver that actually fits to remove them because they are very easy to strip.

Once you've got all the screws removed from the drive bay here you'll see that the back end here has the spaces for the drive slot and you'll want to remember that when you grab your new drive and slide it in so that it butts up securely against the edge here. Then you want to take your screws and you want to put all 4 of them back in.

I'm going to put the drive back in the same way that I took it out, which is slide it in with the little handle here facing outward and then slide it over to the left until it locks into place. And you can feel it lock- it's a nice solid connection there. And you're going to take the blue screw that you originally took out and screw it back in. Again, be careful with this screw- this one can strip as well.

Making Sure the Upgraded Playstation 3 Hard Drive Works

And just snap the cover back into place. Now, it's time to plug everything back in and power on. And, whenever you install a new hard drive in a PlaySation, it will ask you to format it. Simply say "Yes." All data will be lost- it's brand new, there's no data on it, click "Yes." The format is completed, needs to restart. Restart the system. Go to the backup utility, and we'll hit "Restore," "Restore data that has been backed up," and it's found our external device. It will copy all of the data over from your hard drive. Once the trasfer is complete, I'll have converted my 60 gig PlayStation into a 500 gig Playstation.

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