New Hard Drive in PS3
I replaced me 60 gig hard drive in my Play Station 3 to a 320 gig a few days ago and I wish I could say that it all went as smoothly as every guide tells you it will, but it didn’t.
I found the hardest part overall was getting the replacement hard drive, as I was using an old 2.5” portable WD hard drive my first step was prying it out of its case without harming the hard drive itself, which I have to say was completely nerve wracking! Unfortunately I did end up breaking the case into a few pieces in the end but as it was a spare it wasn’t too much of a loss if you want to reuse the case there’s really not much hope of being able to, so make sure your sure about taking it apart before you do anything!
Ok so step by step and problems i encountered along the way:
1: Obviously you’ll need to back up everything from your current hard drive. If you have a 60 Gb hard drive you’ll need a 60 Gb hard drive to back up to and it MUST be formatted to fat32 format for it to work. I couldn’t get your hands on a hard drive big enough to hold my data because fat32 isn’t used as often anymore, so I just used a 4 gig pen drive to back up just the save data.
2: Make sure your trophies are all synched and de-activate your account in account settings. You wont need to delete your profile as long as it is de-activated it wont count to your 5 profiles, and you’ll still have all your data on a backup hard drive if your new one for some reason fails.
3: On the bottom of the Play Station there’s a small black cover, pry this open from the RIGHT hand side. Screw out the large blue screw under the small metal tag on the bottom of the hard drive case. Once you have screwed it out you can use the metal tag to pull the hard drive to the right and then out.
4: Unscrew the hard drive from its case from the 2 screws on either side. Mostly the screws should come out alright, but in my experience two of the screws just would not come out no matter what. The only solution was to use a flat headed pliers and then they came out just fine. If you made the mistake I did and ended up breaking the threads on the screws then you’ll be glad to know that when the hard drive goes back in it will be ok with just one screw on either side so you don’t have to worry about using broken screws.
5: Slide the hard drive out and slide the new one in, screw back in and put back into the play station the same way you took it out, making sure you slide it back into the left fully; you’ll know when you see the holes for the large blue screw line up. Put the blue screw back in and the black cover on and now its time to turn on your Play Station 
6: The first thing you see will be a message asking to format the new hard drive and click ok.
7: Your account details should still be there just select to re-activate in the same way you de-activated it.
8: Connect the hard drive you backed up everything to and start copying over, this can take a long time. If you did what I did and only backed up your save files then you’ve got a long day of re-downloading all your games ahead of you.
So I hope this helps and enjoy all the awesome new space on your Play Station 3 
