Up until now, I had three dilemmas:

  1. My desktop PC is old and only has 80 GB of internal memory.
  2. My PS3 is new, but we opted for the 80 GB version instead of the larger drive ones.
  3. My photos, music and videos were getting ready to hit the ‘I can’t fit in here!’ level on both systems.

For months I had wondered what kind of storage I would need to buy…should I get a solid state drive? Flash memory? External? New Tower?

I decided that Seagate would fit my needs. I originally wanted a Free Agent Go, in a cute color like Pink or Purple in the 640 GB size, but I didn’t really want to wait for the drive to take it’s time to get to me, so I bought a Seagate, larger in physical size, 500GB external hard drive from the evil empire Wally-world.

The drive itself is aesthetically pleasing; completely black, shiny laquered outside, and minimal frou-frou. It’s larger than the Free Agent Go, but portability is not really my target here.

This hack will work with drives up to 1 TB in size.

When I plugged the drive into my desktop, I went to

Start -> Run -> DISKMGMT.MSC .

I didn’t re-name the drive and kept it as the F: drive. However, there were two things wrong with the drive that wouldn’t make it readable to the PS3:

  1. It was a SATA formatted drive and
  2. It was not recognized as a Mass Storage Device, but rather a ‘Seagate’, which is fine for my PC but not good for my PS3 because my PS3 will never recognize a ‘Seagate’.

So onward to the fast and simple conversion from SATA to FAT32. Windows has a very nifty formatter, however the problem is that Windows XP won’t let you format a volume bigger than 32GB with FAT32, and here I’ve got a 500GB drive.

Follow these instructions precisely and you’ll be good to go:

1. Plug in your external Hard drive (up to 2TB)
2. Go to http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/ and on the sidebar, click on FAT32 Formatter.
3. Download their FAT32 Format software (which is a .zip file)
4. Extract the FAT32 Format software directly to your C: drive
5. Go to Start -> Run -> cmd
6. In the Command Prompt window type: CD /D c:\
7. Then type: fat32format f:
8. cmd will ask if you are REALLY sure that you want to format this drive.
9. Press YES and you’ll be done in a couple of seconds!

So now you’ve got a big fat drive that is compatible with your PC and your PS3. What’s next?

What’s next is that you need to create a folder hierarchy that will make sense on your PC and work well with your PS3 for now and for the future.

  • MUSIC
  • PICTURE
  • PS3
  • SAVEDATA (PS3 game saves)
  • THEME (new in firmware 2.0)
  • UPDATE (firmware update file)
  • VIDEO
By Links, Technology