Lacie 500 Gig USB HDD £64.99 Staples
I bought this drive due to my original PS3'd Blu-ray rom drive no longer reading PS3 discs. My aim was to be able to hook the device up and use the PS3's Backup utility that is located in the System under XMB.
Sadly after waiting 2 hours for it to back up the 50 Gig worth of information on my PS3's HDD it failed. And gave an error code.
So I thought may be it's due to copy righted material ie music or Divx's. So I manaually copied all the files over in batches to the HDD. I had very little trouble transfering the movie files, some music failed due to copyright issues. All the pictures transferred without issue. The main sticking problem was Save data files ie Game update files and Cache files. So I deleted all the ones I was not using and all the files that had sucessfully copied and tried running the Backup utility again. This failed at 86% with another error code.
As my machine was due to be exchanged that day I copied all the games saves manually, well all the ones that would allow me to.
I contacted Customer services with regards the back up error no. and was told that it was due to copyrighted material , ie SingStar songs and games.
Also certain games saves stored on other users couldn't be backed up to the HDD as they had the same file name so had to be backed up on additional devices ie MS Duo's, and USB keys. This issue was also noted when backing up the internal PS1/2 Memory cards.
The strange thing was that the HDD did show an amount of information had been stored from the backup but would not delete as it it hadn't finallised the backup.
So My machine was exchanged and all the data I could keep was stored fine. As I noted when I booted the new machine but wouldn't Restore The HDD was read and I could see the files. Strangely you cannot create playlist for files stored externally to the internal HDD. Which seems to be a bit of an oversight. The device is viewable via Remote play on the PSP.
My biggest issue is the way the files are stored in folders. These folder are based on how the files were organised on the PS3 HDD before backup, so unless they were all backed up in one folder the files tend to be all mixed up. The only I found to resolve this was to transfer all the files of a specific type back tp the PS3 HDD Organise them and then copy them back to the external HDD. Very time consuming.
The drive it's self is a black metal box with four rummber feet.
It only has a USB plug that connects to the PS3's USB connections (this actually works with the PS3 stand I have so is nicely out of the way, so no hanging wires. The Drive is a powered unit requiring it be plugged into the mains via an adaptor.
The drive is releatively quiet when in operation but I tend to turn it off when I don't require it. In therory this drive should be usable on a PC / Mac as it's FAT32 formated which is what the PS3 required.
I had asked about swapping out the PS3 HDD before replacement and was told that this wasn't possible. This was confirmed by a friend who tried to install the drive in another PS3 and was told all he could do was format the drive. This makes me think that due to copyright and ownership of games and files that internal HDDs are keyed to each machine.
If you need an external storeage solution I can recommend this as a quick and cheap option but there are lots of other types of devices including media server HDD that can be shared via a router.
