PS3 Hard Drive Upgrade : Success! (Things to know.)

I've completed the operation on my PS3 with less complications than expected. Now we're rocking a 500 gb drive that runs a bit quieter than the OEM 40 gb Drive.

Some things I'd like to share with my fellow PS3 owners:

• I was worried that the drive that I was going to use to back up my PS3 Data ( my PSP with a 4 gb card ) was not big enough I was right. To solve this little problem all I did was erase the GAME DATA from the PS3 ( this is the data that is stored on the PS3 hard drive from the game disk to help minimize load times during gameplay NOT THE GAME SAVES) this takes up anywhere between 1 gb to 8 gb per game.

• With the Game Data removed my back up went from 30 gb to 688 mb and I keep all of my game saves, files, pics wallpapers intact.

• Another great thing to know is that once you slap the new hard drive in and turn the system on, the internal PS3 memory retains your user ID even before you restore the data that you backed up! My user name, password and network settings where right there from the get go, if the back up failed for whatever reason, all I had to do was go to the PS store and download the software I had purchased and start my games over from the beginning ( thankfully that's not the case ) pretty nifty.

• I checked all of my save files in each game and everything from my Burnout paradise car collection to the hard to unlock characters in Street fighter 4 and weapons in Resident evil 5 are all still intact. All I have to do is update each game by popping it in once and downloading each game patch ( the downside of erasing the game data )

Good luck to anyone out there willing to DIY your PS3 hard drive upgrade, just remember, the hardest part is picking the right drive, everything else from back up to paying my saved game took me less than 10 minutes.