For some odd reason, I decided to finally upgrade my Playstation 3′s hard drive this past weekend.  It was the 80gb (w/ software backwards compatibility), and like everything else, I’ve consumed all the hard drive space.  Wanting to continue downloading–and hoarding–high-definition videos, I juggled some of my extra laptop hard drives and settled on giving it a 250gb 5400rpm drive rather than the old 160gb 7200rpm drive that’s currently in my laptop.  The 320gb 5400rpm (but Samsung fast) drive I bought who knows how long ago will eventually go into my laptop.

In all fairness, some of the issues I encountered during this torturous procedure weren’t Sony’s fault and instead problems with my own ambition.  But most of them were.

Sony’s official method for upgrading hard drives is to use a FAT32-formatted USB hard drive to save a backup of the current drive’s contents.  You could then restore the backup to the newly installed drive after the swap.  Major issue: FAT32 is a (relatively) old format for high-capacity hard drives.  Even though it is technically a proprietary Microsoft format, NTFS is what’s been current since XP came out 5 or 6 (or however many) years ago, and in the time since, has gotten support from within non-MS operating systems.  Sony’s support documents also list some files as uncopyable, such as DRM files (which in the world of digital distribution could be just about anything, especially with such a lacking description), PS1 & PS2 save games, and untransferable data (also incredibly vague).

Wanting to avoid this juggling headache and speed up the process, I attempted to clone the old hard drive to the new one to cut out the middle man.  Reports online had mixed success, but I decided to give it a go.  The utilities I used reported that the PS3′s hard drive was all unallocated space.  You would expect it, however, to at least recognize that there was some partition with data even if it didn’t know how to handle Sony’s proprietary formatting.  I did a bit-by-bit copy anyway, which took somewhere over 4 hours.  I inserted the new drive into the system and booted up successfully.  Unfortunately, though it recognized the drive as being of larger capacity, it didn’t show any increase in free space.  I attempted deleting something to see if it would rescan the free space and update the tally, but that plan failed.  Because the utilities on my PC didn’t even recognize any partition, I couldn’t stretch it, either.  So at this point, I saw that I had to play it Sony’s way.

Since Sony’s support documents said that PS1 & PS2 save files wouldn’t automatically be backed up, I had to move them off of the system.  Way back when I bought this PS3, I picked up Datel’s Data Max PS2–>PS3 USB memory card adapter.  Where this differed from Sony’ official version was that it included a PC utility that would help you juggle save files from a larger-than-8mb memory card so you could put them on a standard capacity card and thus upload them to your PS3.  Also, it was strictly PS2 only with no PS1 memory card support, but that wasn’t too important for me.  Whether it was the reader or the used (but official) memory card I was attempting to use, something was broken.

I would consistently get errors when trying to delete the card’s previous owner’s save games, and unfortunately the PS3 doesn’t have a simple “format” command.    One of the issues I was having was the slow save file detection time.  At one point, I deleted the last currently visible save file (which was far from the last actual existing one), and something decided the card was now empty.  When I tried to access it again, the PS3 said I needed to format the card.  “Well damn.  That’s all I wanted from the start!”  Oops.  Error.  I figured that maybe using the PC based utility would help me.  No real luck there.  The software would sometimes recognize I had a card plugged in, but it would fail to read its contents.  I’ve concluded that this reader is likely busted, but it’s been over a year, so I can’t exchange it at Best Buy anymore.  Wanting to make sure all my bases were covered, I determined I needed to A.) swap out this memory card (also over two months since purchase) and B.) get Sony’s official adapter.  Unfortunately, it was about 4 or 5 am at this point.  But fortunately, I found the official adapter at a nearby GameStop and the guys swapped out the card no problem.  I now easily (but tediously) deleted the new memory card’s save files and backed up my own.

Time to back up the hard drive.  Fortunately it turns out the ancient FAT32-formatted hard drive I used at school for video editing on the Macs had space available, so I set that up on my PS3.  About 2 hours and 40 minutes later, the PS3 had finished its procedure.  I swapped in the 250gb drive and went through the formatting process.  The previous night, while waiting for the drives to clone, I investigated installing Linux on the PS3.  I determined it was nothing but  novelty, so that saved me from going through another arduous process after getting the new drive up and running.  Now I needed to restore my backup.  The utility prompted me to point to the device where the backup was stored (it could be stored on a USB hard drive or flash drive or any supported memory cards).  I pointed it to the only USB storage device I had plugged in:  my hard drive.  However, it was listed with some seemingly random name in parenthesis, which didn’t seem to correlate with the name of the partition nor the drive’s model number.  The next screen prompted me to choose a backup, and the sole highlighted option was a long string of numbers.  Excuse me?  I can save multiple backups?  Could I have named them?  If not, how the hell would I know what incomprehensible gibberish option to choose at this point?  Dammit, Sony, you know what I want to do, don’t make me jump through hoops.  An equivalent 2 hours and 40 or so minutes later, things were back to normal, now with much more storage capacity.

But that’s just what I went through during the upgrade process.  The PS3 has many more user-unfriendly quirks that you may or may not already have the misfortune to be familiar with.

When you download demos or DLC on an Xbox 360, it’s immediately available to use after completion.  On the PS3, you still have to wait for the damned thing to extract and install itself, which, depending on the size of the file, could take upwards of 5 minutes.  For fuck’s sake, Sony, haven’t you heard of ease of use?  There are some times where it’s no exaggeration when I say that on some days it takes an hour before I can do anything on this damned console.  First I have to wait and install some mandatory OS update.  The 360 often has these mandatory updates, but they download and install in a flash.  PS3′s eat up 10-20 mostly non-automated minutes.  Then when you get back up and running, you insert your new game.  Oh wait, mandatory hard drive install!  Done with that?  Hold, on there’s a patch!  We’re not done yet!  There’s yet another patch, which somehow doesn’t include all the stuff from previous updates to simplify the process into a single download!  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!

What’s nice (or used to be nice back when Xbox was limited to six queued downloads) is that the PS3 seems to allow for an unlimited number of queued downloads.  That is, unless you have too many things waiting to be installed.  Yet another reason I don’t like this whole “zipped package” method (which doesn’t even have smaller downloads than the 360 equivalent).  What’s strange is that you run into this error even when trying to queue video/image/music files, which do not need to be installed.

I don’t know why Sony insists on using actual computer nerd lexicon instead of making it simple for the consumer.  Really, who should have to know what’s the difference between ad-hoc and infrastructure wi-fi networks?  Why not say local and internet?  People understand the scope differences there.

Here’s another fun example of not following the KISS rules.  Right now I’m in the process of installing and updating Metal Gear Online after finishing installing Metal Gear Solid 4 (afforded by my new-found hard drive space).  Of course there’s a mandatory update.  It presents me the option of downloading through Peer-to-Peer (“recommended,” it says) or HTTP.  It gives a quick quip about the BitTorrent method (yes, it said “BitTorrent”) being faster when there’s more users online and the HTTP method being faster when there’s less.  What it doesn’t say is that “users online” really means users running the download utility.  Really, who’d be so generous as to just sit at that screen which you only ever access the single time you have to download that one update?  Though I’m sure Konami and/or Sony are providing some sort of seed, I didn’t get any movement after sitting on the screen for five minutes.  The direct download HTTP option is barely any better, moving at an unbelievable crawl.  It’s at about 75% right now after about an hour.

Well, at least unlike the Metal Gear Online beta (and Motorstorm, and I’m sure other unfortunate cases), these updates are all rolled into a single package.

Sony, I don’t care that you label this obelisk a computer as a tax dodge.  It’s not.  It’s a consumer electronics device, and it should just work.  And not everyone is a computer geek; make the lingo more layman friendly.