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Background:

I’ve owned a PS3 for a very long time. Yes I know, it is old considering PS5 is scheduled for Holidays 2020. But for a casual gamer like me it is fine and lot of us still rock it. More importantly i have a BluRay disc collection and ocassionally I like watching movies on good old physical media.

It started with 80 GB fat PS3, I loved that design! If consoles were cars, fat PS3 would have been a Mercedes. But one fine day the console just died as if it had cardiac arrest. Even solid red power indicator refused to turn on. I took it to local Sony service center & they said that they will have to replace it. Since my console was out of warranty, I will have to fork out $100 for the replacement. Deep inside I was happy that I will be getting new console for $100. Sixteen days later I got a call from Sony guys that my conslole has arrived and I can come a collect it. I have to say I was impressed by their service.

The new console was slim PS3 with 160GB HDD! Design-wise not very impressive but here I had – a new console for $100! I wasn’t complaining. I have to add here I am not much of a gamer. I love Gran Turismo & few other titles. I use PS3 more for media consumption & have an impressive collection of Blu-ray Discs. I am always on a look out for new deals on Blu-rays. In my country we don’t get Netflix or another streaming service. YouTube, PlayStation® Store & Internet radio works fine. Additionally I have a huge collection of MP3s & photographs which I’ve dumped on my PS3. In short PS3 is the center of my universe!

Stuff you Googled this blog for:

It all started with random freeze & skipping. My PS3 was two years old. Games would suddenly pause, XMB would stutter & overall operation became unbearably slow. Last straw was  8002F310 error that I started to get post 4.50 firmware release. I fixed it by getting into a PS3’s Safe Mode option. PS3 forums suggested more complex procedures but sometimes keeping things simple helps! But overall degradation in performance continued to plague the system.

Simultaneously I was running low on storage with only 18GB/160GB being available. After much Googling I decided to pick Seagate Momentus 320 GB Laptop Internal Hard Drive (ST9320325AS). I heard some good words about this drive on various forums besides PS3 is notoriously finicky about hard drives. I shelled out $55 for the HDD.

In case you are keen, PS3 came with a Toshiba HDD & this was root of all my misery.

I started with taking a backup of all the existing data in the console. I referred this guide. Safe to say it took a good while before everything was backed up. 

Now it was time for some real action!

Replacing/upgrading PS3’s hard drive doesn’t voids warranty. Good guys at Sony took care of this. Replacement of hard drive was extraordinarily easy! Once I replaced old Toshiba with new Seagate it was time to power on the machine. Needless to say I was excited and then…DAMN!

I was clueless.

I read on forums that the moment you replace hard drive PS3 auto formats it to FAT32. I decided to boot into Safe Mode but of no avail. I tried all the options & failed. PS3 now wanted firmware on USB drive to boot itself. Fair enough that is some headway out of nowhere. I will take it. I did exactly the way Sony wanted. Still no luck, I was struck with 8002F281. I started to think that Seagate drive was probably defective! 

I quickly reverted back to old Toshiba which I had pulled out few moments ago. No luck again. 8002F281continued to haunt me. I was now staring at a loss of $150 & a really big paperweight. However I noticed that PS3 was trying to write the firmware on both the hard drives before aborting with 8002F281. This was my first clue. 

Or could it be that I need to clean format the hard drive with FAT32 option? I removed SATA 3 interface from my (old) external hard drive and plugged in the new Seagate HDD to it. I used Disk Utility program on Mac to format the new drive.

Note: If you are a Windows XP/Vista/7 user you may encounter issues because Windows doesn’t do FAT32 formatting for drives beyond 32GB. They say this is for performance enhancement, I don’t believe it. Besides Sony will never pay Microsoft for NTFS related patents. However many of third party tools are available as well as Windows own (sometimes unreliable) cmd line tool.

Fair enough I was able to format my new Seagate HDD in FAT32 without any further issues. I inserted back new HDD & powered on the console.

Lo & behold!

PS3 came back to life. It started tarted to format & initialise the new drive. Within 30 minutes, the drive was formatted & new firmware was installed. I must say Seagate Momentus 320 GB is quite nice and I can see the system performance improve by a couple of notches. It was an effort worth undertaking.

Hope my experience (albeit long) helps someone is distress. To sum it up:

• ALWAYS Format new drive in FAT32
• Keep new Firmware handy

Enjoy the upgrade!

Couple of years back above title wouldn’t have made lot of sense but thanks to Apple nixing headphone jack in 2016 and we are in a situation where inclusion of headphone jack in a device seen as a feature. Sure, Apple doesn’t use USB-C yet in phones (probably 2019?) but it was a turning-point that made other smartphone makers realize that there is money to be made here if they start selling their own “proprietary” headphones or Bluetooth headsets. And by 2019 every smartphone maker (barring few) started removing 3.5mm headphone jack from their phones.

Situation was so bad in 2018 that when Google came out with their Pixel 2 phones – their first phones without headphone jack – they didn’t bundle any headphones in their retail box. Either you use the dongle and embrace #dongleLife or buy a Bluetooth headset. Good luck if you want to buy PixelBuds and you reside outside of US. Thankfully situation is a bit better in 2019, One Plus has come out with their own nominally priced USB – C headphones and Google has started to bundle USB-C headphones inside their retail box.

While I am firmly in headphone jack camp, let us unbiasedly analyze if having USB-C audio bring any enhancement in audio quality. USB-C (which also sometimes referred as USB Type-C) is a 24-pin, two-fold rotationally-symmetrical connector. The standard was first finalized in August 2014 and has since seen few versions upgrade latest being version 3.2. Some features are mandatory to implement (adhering to data transfer throughputs) some aren’t (USB Power Delivery). As you may have guessed, USB-C is sort of swiss army knife of connectors. From providing interface, to delivering power to outputting music for you – you just need one port! So far so good. But things are not so magical in USB-C universe yet as Google engineer pointed out in his blog post. Sure, that was 2015 post and we are in 2018, things have improved today, reliability has gone up but there are few inherent for using one port for everything. Allow me to list them:

1. You won’t able to use my existing headphones while charging my device.
2. Dongle/adapter is a tiny little hack and you’ll probably lose the moment to take it out of the box
3. USB port is one of the most fragile part of the device, extra wear and tear of headphone may damage the assembly

Does so much compromise bring any bump in the audio quality after all we are talking about replacing a legacy port with something innovated as recently as this decade?

Probably not.

Sure, technology is digital but our ears perceive analog audio so modulating analog signal to digital to analog doesn’t bring any significant improvements. Moreover, we have been listening to digital audio for at least a decade now. CDs are a digital source. Does that mean audio quality of, say, cassettes are same as CDs? Answer lies somewhere in between. For one dynamic range of a CD player (96dB) is higher than even the best of audio cassette player so is frequency response and S/N ratio. Net result is CD player sounds better than magnetic media (audio cassettes). We can interpolate the same reasoning to 3.5mm audio output and output through USB-C ports. Crucial difference being in case of USB-C audio output from phone (most of the time) is digital and after that we may need DAC (digital to analog converter) to convert the digital signals back to analog so that our ears may perceive the way it should be. Some phones have DAC embedded inside main chassis and we need an adapter just to connect our 3.5mm headphone. But in most phones (Pixels, One Plus 6Ts etc.) have DAC embedded in the adapters. Thumb rule of sound engineering says that the more you convert a signal the more you lose out chance of faithful reproduction because there are losses in every circuitry. That is why the best CD players do only one thing – PLAY audio CDs. Add DVD compatibility, add more features and you lose the pristine nature of sound.

As far as trend of removing 3.5mm ports goes it points only one things – device makers want to gouge us out for even more money because so far we have not seen an appreciable increase in battery backup or a bump in audio quality.