Need to replace my PS3 Hard Drive... Help!

  • Thread starter Crumpet
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Crumpet

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Hey, Sloth here.

I've recently purchased a temporary 12GB Super Slim PS3 due to the release of numerous rather exciting games. However, I'm having an extremely slow FPS on pretty much every game I play, this is because GTA V was an 8 GB install and I have barely any space left, well, at least I think so. I had the same issue on my old 40GB fat model, where the frames started dropping as I reached 35GB.

I'm just wondering if it would be wise to use my old hard drive, which is about 4 to 5 years old in my new system? I haven't touched my 40GB since release, it stayed in the console. I was wondering if there are any problems with this? I don't want to damage anything in the process of course. I would much rather use an old one than save me the cost of having to buy a brand new one. I have cleaned all the dust off the old hard drive and its sitting next to me, I've had no issues with it so far, but won't it be worn the hell out?

A lot of people seem to be having problems with these 12GB models in terms of framerate, makes sense.
 
As long as you're aware that a) you have to format the drive and will lose everything and b) the drive is relatively advanced in age and could fail and you should therefore back up all of your important saves (or transfer them to the PS+ cloud feature if you can), I say go for it and see if it helps. 40GB is still tiny though, if it were me I'd buy a ~320GB drive at least. I have a 320GB drive that I used to have in my old, now YLOD '60GB' in my '160GB' slim and it can hold a lot of stuff, as in enough games for you to get bored by the time you've scrolled to the bottom of the list.
 
I've seen a hard drive last up to 11 years old before it gave up the ghost(Internal motor died). So I would say it should not be a problem. If you would like to. You can connect it inside your desktop computer. As long as it's within 5 years of age it should work. Power off the computer, disconnect the cables in the back, bring a chair or a table near the computer and place it on there on it's side. Open the side panel and borrow the power and data cables from the DVD Drive and connect the hard drive. You can place the hard drive on the metal bay that holds the hard drives and DVD drives. Reconnect the cables. Power up, download and install "Speedfan" to check the hard drive SMART data(Tells you the basic health of the drive). There is a tab labeled "S.M.A.R.T" in the program. Click it, select your hard drive from the drop down menu and click "Perform an in-depth online analysis of this hard drive". A page should show up in your default web browser and tell you if it's suffering from any problems. If you want any advice please make a screenshot of the graph and of any information below the graph.

If it comes down to it you can easily buy a new 320GB-500GB hard drive for around $50-$70.
 
I would recommend a program called HDTune Pro.

You can do benchmarks on it, look at the SMART values, check SMART logs.
 
Cheers for the advice guys!

I was wondering, am I correct in saying the hard drive is causing the low FPS? My TV is running the correct settings and the PS3 is brand new. Just wondering before I buy a new hard drive, anyone had any experiences?
 

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