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!
