PS3 Hard Drive failure

[buggenhagen]

So a few months back I changed the harddrive in my PS3 - a very simple operation that went smoothly - and everything was running great with my spanking new 250gb machine. The other day it starts to chug a bit when loading Bionic Commando, taking a while to boot up etc.

I turned the machine on last night and it said there had been a hard drive failure and it needed to restore. It restored fine - everything was there - but now all my save files are corrupt and I've had to download all my PSN titles again as the copy protection info was invalid.

Now I'm not bothered about loading the games again since I don't have to pay for them again and the save thing is a massive pain in the arse (completed files for GTA, MGS4, Uncharted, DMC4, Burnout Paradise etc) but, having got over the initial annoyance last night, at least I get to play through everything again from scratch.

The things I'm wondering are: how common is this? Now that my hard drive is restored is it liable to happen again or should I ditch it? And if you back up your save games is the info all valid if the same happens again? And why can't we back up our saves via the PSN or something so that all the info is good if the drive goes down?

[Number45]

A slippery slope, in my experience. Once a hard drive starts to give indications of failure the very least you should start doing is backing things up regularly to minimise the impact of failure.

[buggenhagen]

Yeah, I've got a fair bit of hard drive failure experience in PC's so that's what I was thinking... the weird thing is that nothing was wiped from the drive when it restored - over 100gb of movies and photos still there so it's not like the thing was formatted.

What exactly does the restore then? Was it just one corrupt file that caused the problem or was it the drive itself? Should probably get onto Sony for some advice.

[Decider-VT]

Which brand of hard drive were you using? Some manufacturers seem to produce more reliable drives than others.

[capcom_suicide]

Which brand of hard drive were you using? Some manufacturers seem to produce more reliable drives than others.

Good question & for buying a new one, do you have any top tips?

I have the NTSC-U/C 60GB release model and want to chuck a faster, bigger disk. Max price ?100

What should I buy?

[Number45]

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=869575

I'm thinking of going for this when it's back in stock. Should be more than enough, even though I'm planning on picking up PSN version of games from now on where possible.

[Dazzyman]

I have a Seagate 7200rpm momentus in mine (mines 160 gig but you can get a 300gig one for same price now!). Its worked fine for nearly 2yrs in JPN launch model not a single hiccup and as its a faster drive you get instalations abit faster and loading times same

[Number45]

I was always a little wary of going for a 7200rpm drive, purely because it would (I'd imagine) generate more heat and the PS3 is (I'd imagine) designed around the heat produced by a 5400rpm drive.

I'd imagine.

(I'm paranoid about things like this)

[losersclub]

Novatech.co.uk has some good drives on offer, just bought a new one for mine from there myself

[buggenhagen]

It's a Western Digital, here's the info:

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?QuickLinx=4LG3

Got it from Dabs.

[Decider-VT]

Good question & for buying a new one, do you have any top tips?

I have the NTSC-U/C 60GB release model and want to chuck a faster, bigger disk. Max price ?100

What should I buy?

Well, I was going to recommend a Western Digital drive but I don't know if I should now. In all seriousness, a friend of mine recently installed the 320GB variant of buggenhagen's drive (as linked above) and he's had no problems so far. I've used WD drives for my PCs for some time now and I've found them to be very reliable.