My PS3 now has a 300gig hard drive. I'll never delete anything ever again.

My 60gig PS3 was just too full - only around 12gig available - so I cracked under the pressure and ordered a 320gig drive through Amazon. It is amusing searching for 2.5" SATA laptop hard drives because most of the online store comments are from PS3 owners in various stages of satisfaction.

Here's the way the upgrade works: You back up your PS3's contents to some external drive. Then you remove the old HD and stick in the new HD. Then you plug that external drive back in and restore the contents.

Cutting in short: it worked. Although I had received plenty of warning from people who lost some files, or saves didn't copy over, or whatever... for me, the backup/restore process was clean and perfect. I did not have to re-download any purchased materials from the store, and I did not lose any files. I didn't even have to re-enter my PSN account name and password.

That's not to say I didn't have some stress along the way.

First issue, the backup drive. Now, the PS3 does compress the files somewhat when it creates a backup file... but who can say just how far down it can smoosh 48gigs? So I wanted at least 50gig of storage on whatever media I could find for the backup. I dived for Rhonda's 60gig iPod. It would only be for temporary storage; once my PS3 was back up, I'd clear out the iPod-as-backup and turn it back to normal.

Now, the PS3 only sees one disk format: FAT32, the classic Windows format, I gather. The iPod, naturally, is in HFS+... but it's nothing to wipe an iPod, right? You just sync it again and hey presto you're back in business. So I turned the iPod into a FAT32 format (warning: this makes the iPod non-functional as an iTunes-enabled media player). Unfortunately, the PS3 would not mount it. I know it was FAT32, I plugged it in via USB (where I know previous USB drives have worked), so I have no clue why the PS3 hated the iPod. I formatted the poor iPod again and again, but the PS3 simply would not cooperate with it.

I gave up and restored the iPod back to factory settings HFS+ whatever, and it came back resurrected as if nothing happened. But this left me with the question of where to find another storage drive.

So we bought one of those 320gig My Notebook portable USB drives. Which is sort of ironic since the SATA drive I bought for the PS3 was also 320gigs. They were both roughly the same price, in the $60-$80 range... but still, that makes this little project moderately pricy. The silver lining is that now I have a 320gig portable USB drive to use to stash some beloved iMac files that I have never, ever bothered to backup.

More good news... the My Notebook drive came out of the box already formatted to FAT32. I was a little worried about that since I'm not sure how I would have formatted it by myself. If my iMac couldn't get an iPod to a proper FAT32 (not that I know it was the iMac's fault that the PS3 wouldn't see the iPod), what would I have done? I guess I would have brought the USB drive in to work and formatted via a PC there. But this project was already languishing in time, so I'm glad I didn't have to lose another day to a PC format trip.

The PS3 popped up the Notebook drive right away, and the Backup Utility took about an hour to create a 35gig backup file. Not bad at all.

Then things took a turn. Literally.

I prepared for PS3 surgery, watched an online how-to video. I removed the 60gig original drive but had a hell of a time detaching the HD from the chassis. The four screws that needed to come out where tighter than shrunken Tupperware. I stripped at least one of the screws really badly and was convinced that I was holding my gaming future in my clumsy, unskilled hands. Rhonda pointed out that the screws were likely originally assembled by unfeeling robots. I did manage to get all four screws out, but it took at least half an hour. Seriously, I am terrible.

Aside from the actual screwing, swapping in the new drive was no problem.

The PS3 rebuilt itself; it restored the backup material in another hour. And it looks like everything came back just as I left it. All my downloaded games, demos and Rock Band songs. All my save files and unlocked LittleBigPlanet content. The 5gig mandatory install for Resident Evil 5 (boy, we're all happy about THAT). I didn't even have to re-login to the PlayStation Network; it remembered my account and password.

I haven't tried Home yet, but let's just assume that works as well as ever, eh?

Now that I have all this lovely space available, I might actually splurge on buying some movies or TV shows.