Momentus XT, Momentus, Momentus Thin, MobileMax, and other notebook drives

[emaildejan]

I have a Sony Play Station 3 60GB...and I was interested in swapping out the original 60GB 2.5" SATA hard drive that came with the system, and replacing it with the Momentus XT 500GB hybrid drive, and as such I have a few quesitons.

First, will the hard drive work in my PS3?

Second, will I have to do anything special when it comes to formatting the drive?  Or can I let the PS3 do it on its own?

Third, will I notice a significant speed improvement?  I've seen the videos for laptops, but I wonder if I will see the same with the PS3.

Thank you in advance for any information you can provide me.

Sincerely,

Dejan

[AlanM]

I can only answer #2 - http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=200895&NewLang=en

You'd need to format it to FAT32, and the PS3 can't do it.

[Craiji · Accepted solution]

JUST put one in my PS3 to replace my Momentus 7200.4, restoring now.

1. Its working now.... hopefully more to report later

2. Nope, went straight out of the shipping box to the PS3, PS3 formatted it fine 

3. Hopefully will see later, its been shown what matters a lot for the PS3 is cache, this has 2X my previous so you should see improvement based on that alone.

[emaildejan]

That's great news.  Glad to hear that the HDD can be installed instantly into the PS3 and have it formatted on its own.  Since the PS3 uses Linux, I'm assuming that the partition sizing is not limited like it is for Windows.  Anyhow, glad to hear it.   Let me know how it holds up...I'm planning on purchasing one later this week.

[Craiji]

So playing around with the hdd a bit, I have noticed some impressive gains, both gt5p and modnations load about 40-50% faster and this is even noticeable from my first time loading the games with the Momentus XT installed.

Work has been busy, I may work on some videos with my slim vs my pals slim (same models purchased at the same time) showing the Momentus 7200.4 vs the Momentus XT

All in all good buy for me.

[rygy666]

I just installed the momentus XT into my ps3 slim it took less than 3min but in order to format the drive the ps3 wanted the newest update that is 3.41 ,I downloaded it on my PC and saved it on a portable usb flash plugged it into the ps3 pressed the start @ select button at the same time and as soon as it recognized the update it started formatting,now its up and running great .I don't have any time differences as of yet but i will be posting some times as soon as i get some results .

  I also did a little research on the temperatures on the stock ps3 5400rpm HD vs 7200rpm momentus XT HD and i found they run at identical temps,there were a lot of people worried about overheating and frying there system using a regular 7200rpm HD but in my opinion i think the momentus XT will run without a hitch.

 If you do plan on getting the the momentus XT i would go with the 500GB just because of the new PSN online vid store those hd movies can take up a lot of space and same with the games. thx psn: rygy666                                                         

[emaildejan]

Cool.  I just ordered 2 Momentus XT 500 GB drives.  One is going into the PS3, and the other is going into my new HP Pavilion dv6-3050us laptop.  We'll see how an AMD Phenom II quad-core processor fares with a 7200 rpm hybrid drive as compared to my stock 5400 640GB hard drive that HP had originally installed in the laptop.  My guess is that I should see night and day improvements over the stock HDD.  Same should hold true for the PS3 hard drive swap.

BTW, once formatted, how hard is it to transfer PS3 game data from my original 60GB hard drive onto the Momentus XT?  Do I need to do anything special, or can I just hook up the old HDD via an external enclosure and connect it via the USB port and use copy/paste? 

[rygy666]

I have a external ulta dock with my old PS3 hard drive in it and my PS3 will not even acknowledge it exists so i just used two 8GB portable usb flash ,the reason for two is that my wife and i play the some of the same games so when i copy the saves from my name onto the flash then try to copy the same game save from her name it says (this file already exists do you wish to delete and over wright this file) so to keep it simple i have one flash for me and one for her. If you have any movies you bought from the PSN online store make sure you back them up its not like a game where if you delete it you can go back and download it again once its deleted its gone and you would have to purchase it again ,all in all its simple and easy it took about 45min for the hole process. thx PSN:rygy666    

[rygy666]

 Sorry i didn't realize what your question was until i got my second coffee in me, anyway DO NOT REMOVE your HD from your ps3 until all your data is backed up, like i said in the above the easiest way is to use a portable usb flash and just COPY data to the flash that's pictures,music,video and game saves than swap the drive and COPY data back to the new HD.if you have any more questions i will be checking back regularly thx PSN:rygy666