PS3 running low on hard drive space.

[MrEco]

I'm sure some of you have had this happen to you before. Yesterday I found myself down to only 7 GB's of space on my PS3. This is a huge problem as you can imagine, since there are still about a dozen games I own for the system which I haven't played yet and may very well require an install to be played. And again there are more games that I still want to buy for the system, some of which aren't even out yet as the PS3 is far from dead.

So I'm curious, what do you all do when you reach this point?

Well deleting things is the obvious answer I think, and that's exactly what I did today. Removed the game data and saved files for all games I know I'll never go back and play again, but left the ones I want to keep for prosperity sake or that I felt I might go back and play again someday. Also found some dynamic themes I don't remember downloading and got rid of those. All in total I'm now up to a much more comfortable 46 GB's.

But I'm wondering if there are alternatives to this. I've heard you can open up a PS3 and switch out for a bigger hard drive, but that sounds kinda complicated considering consoles aren't really meant to be messed with like that. There's also the option of buying a newer PS3 with a bigger hard drive and transferring the data over, but that's quite expensive. Perhaps worth it though.

So yeah, that's it really, just curious to see everyone's solution to this problem.

[Violent By Design]

I'm pretty sure you can upload your save files onto the PSN server and you can delete the games you legally own and redownload them whenever.

[isiolia]

But I'm wondering if there are alternatives to this. I've heard you can open up a PS3 and switch out for a bigger hard drive, but that sounds kinda complicated considering consoles aren't really meant to be messed with like that. There's also the option of buying a newer PS3 with a bigger hard drive and transferring the data over, but that's quite expensive. Perhaps worth it though.

Swapping the PS3 HDD is actually supported and not all that difficult to do. I put a 1 TB drive in my primary one, then shuffled the 160GB drive down to my (previously) 80GB model.

The main tedium in the process is migrating your data. You'll want a third drive (USB or on a USB dock) to run the backup utility, which takes a while. Then, after swapping the drive, you run the restore utility and it puts it all back like it was. You can't just run the backup or restore directly between the drives.

[Fragems]

I'm pretty sure you can upload your save files onto the PSN server and you can delete the games you legally own and redownload them whenever.

If your talking about PS+ then yeah when you activate them it count's as a purchase and they stick to the account as long as you have PS+. Thats why everytime I see a new game pop up I act like i'm downloading it and then I cancel right after the activation screen that way they are available on the my account as long as PSN is available.

As for hard drive upgrades I don't think it was to difficult on the original fat models but the newer ones are probably alot more difficult.



nm the newer models might even be easier lol.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

You've already listed the only two solutions.

[noiseredux]

if you want to replace yours, I've got a 160GB to spare.

[MrEco]

As for hard drive upgrades I don't think it was to difficult on the original fat models but the newer ones are probably alot more difficult.



nm the newer models might even be easier lol.

Wow, that's kinda surprising. Good to know.

if you want to replace yours, I've got a 160GB to spare.

Nah, my current one is 120. If I ever do go the upgrade route I'll definitely be getting one much bigger, like a 250 at least. Thanks though.


By the way, does anyone know of a resource that lists all PS3 games which require a hard drive install?


EDIT: Apparently somehow my top reply got deleted before I submitted this post originally. Don't know what I did there, lol.

[dsheinem]

deleting game data (often large filesize) is safe and doesn't effect your progress, saves , records, etc. but deleting your save data (small sized files) will make those go away. Since they sre smalk, they are easy to back up to the cloud or USB.

[Reprise]

I have this problem and i have to keep deleting game data. My only concern with this, though, is when I have to delete game data that has been patched. What if, being a retro gamer, I decide to come back to games in 10/15 years time and find that the PS3 server has been shut down and I'm installing crippled versions of games, with patches no longer available, due to this 'release a botched game, patch it later' generation we live in?

[d123456]

Aren't those patches hoaxes anyway? I have never had a bug that a patch fixed for me.
But that's an entirely different discussion

I need to keep deleting old demos to download/install new ones. It's tedious. Oh well....