As with any purchase, upgrading your PS3's hard drive (hereafter HDD) is all about compromise. In this case it is about compromising storage space in GB with performance (ie 7200PRM and/or 16MB of cache) while remaining in the price point you had set for yourself. The stock HDD's are 5400RPM with 8MB of cache, though reportedly the 20GB model only had 2MB of cache. ¹

The make and model I have tested and am discussing is the Hitachi TravelStar 7K200 160GB 2.5" Mobile Hard Drive with 16MB of cache. If purchased between now and July 31st from Tigerdirect, you benefit from a 20$ mail-in rebate.² Which I did not benefit from since I purchased 4 days before the promotion went into effect and I therefore recycled my packaging already. Your cost will therefore be 80$ if you are an American³ or 102$ if you are Canadian. ⁴ Apparently, Tigerdirect has never heard of currency parity.

I highly suggest that you purchase an enclosure.⁵ The enclosure will allow you 2 advantages: it will protect and allow you to get use out your PS3's stock HDD, (EDIT) which I suggest you keep around in case you need Sony to service your machine and they require you to have it⁹, but it will also allow you to properly use the backup utility of your PS3 EDIT: And serve as a portable HDD you can use with any PC with a USB port. No power supply is needed. To do so, insert your new HDD into your enclosure and, if it is pre-formatted in Fat32, use your enclosure's USB cable to connect it to your PS3 and select Settings - System Settings - Back up utility - Back up. If it was not pre-formated in Fat32, use the USB cable to plug it into your computer and format it yourself to Fat32 (ext2 and ext3 will not be recognized by the PS3). If you use Linux, you will need to install and run gparted as sudo to do so. The PS3 back up data will include your photos, music, PSN games, demos, movies and messages, if your computer has less free space then your PS3 has content, you should delete superfluous content (excess stuff) such as demo's or anything you also have on your PC.

Next, take your new HDD out of the enclosure and switch it with your stock PS3 HDD using the instructions in your manual and/or youtube videos.⁶ Now put your stock PS3 HDD in its new home, the enclosure, and get the back up data from your PC to your new portable HDD. Copy that to your PS3 using Settings - System Settings - Back up utility - Restore and voilà: your PS3 is in the exact state it was before, but it now has room to spare. And room is important, especially with the advent of the Video Store. ⁷

Now for the meat of this article: Is compromising HDD size in GB in the name of performance (7200RPM and 16MB cache) worth while? Or is it worth paying more for that higher performance worth while, if the size is the same?

I have included, below the continuous line, the raw data I have gathered myself on which I base my conclusions. My methodology, unless otherwise specified,  consisted in waiting for an installation bar to appear and jotting down the time using a digital stop watch. The new 160GB HDD was installed into a formerly 40GB PS3 sending out a 1080P signal to my HDTV via HDMI. (EDIT) For test purposes on Gran Turismo 5:Prologue, I forced the system to send a 480p 4:3 signal via HDMI. The 60GB model sends out a 480i signal through component cables left over from the PS2 era.

The installation times off blu-ray disks are non-significant. This is because the bottleneck in both models is the blu-ray drive feeding the HDDs write data and not the speed at which the HDDs write the data.

Installing demos is where performance advantages really manifest themselves since the HDD is constantly reading and/or writting. The performance boost was a respectible 9% of time saved when installing the NCAA demo and a significant 21% of time saved for installing Civilization Revolution.

As for loading data necessary to for specific races in Gran Turismo 5:Prologue, I saw performance increases of between 18% and 40%. The time intervals for these readings are however very small, so they have a MUCH higher margin of error. That being said, those performance gains are there despite the fact that the 160GB version was loading the textures for the game to run in (EDIT) 1080p 480p , instead of 480i for the lower performance model.

EDIT: I pleayed a little bit of DMC4 as requested by some replies and there probably was a diminishing of the HDD loading times, but it was too small to tell, since the loading times are less then 5 seconds for the most part anyways.

So there you have it. There is indeed a performance gain, but will you notice it enough for it to be worth the cost? That depends on you. Do you download a lot of demos and install them in succession and time is of the essence? Then go for the high performance model. Do you not care about saving a minute (or seconds) here or there but instead need massive amounts of space to hold all your legal digital media? Then go for higher GB size. Do you have money to burn? Then get an HDD that's both 7200RPM, 16GB and with a high GB size. At least with my data, you can make a slightly more informed decision.

As for the potential for increased heat and noice that can be associeted with 7200RPM HDDs, they are not a concern with the TravelStar line, according to its official datasheet⁸ which is corroborated by my own personal experience. It is very quite, and any additional heat has been imperceivable by me.

The PS3 will NOT benefit from 3Gb/s so your HDD will revert to 1.5Gb/s since the PS3 is not 3Gb/s compatible. DON'T SPEND extra money for 3Gb/s.

¹ http://ps3.ign.com/articles/745/745407p1.html

² http://static.tigerdirect.com/rebates/HITACHI_HDD_Jul31_08.pdf

³ http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3317097&CatId=2682

⁴ http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3317097&CatId=2682

⁵ http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/search.asp?cat=2783&keywords=2.5%20enclosure&mnf=

⁶ http://youtube.com/results?search_query=ps3+hdd&search_type=

⁷ Offer void is most countries that are not the United States of America

⁸ http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/portal/travelstar/7K200/

⁹ There is conflicting evidence on the internet whether it is important to keep it or not for the sake of servicing. In doubt, I can only recommend that you keep the HDD where you have acces to it if you need it.

Raw Data:

Section 1 : Installs from Blu-ray
Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds
60GB: from 11:56:05 to 12:08:00 = 11 Minutes 55 Seconds
160GB: from 17:21:08 to 17:32:56 = 11 Minutes 48 Seconds
Difference: 7 seconds

Metal Gear Solid 4:
60GB: from 10:28:48 to 10:36:16 = 7 Minutes 28 Seconds
160GB: from 20:22:41 to 20:30:08 = 7 Minutes 27 Seconds
Difference: 1 second

Devil May Cry 4:
60GB: from 11:03:49 to 11:25:15 = 21 Minutes 26 Seconds
160GB: from 17:57:50 to 18:19:10 = 21 Minutes 20 Seconds
Difference: 6 seconds

Section 2: Demo installs from HDD:
The first number is when I pressed the X button over the install icon. The second number is when the install bar appears. The third bar is when the installation was completed. The time from the X press to completion is what counts as the total time.

Civilization Revolution (1293 MB)
60GB: from 10:04:50 and 10:05:35 to 10:08:28 = 3 Minutes 38 Seconds
160GB : from 10:11:30 and 10:12:00 to 10:14:30 = 3 Minutes
Difference: 38 Seconds or 21%

NCAA Football (15XX MB)
60GB: from 15:14:30 and 15:15:20 to 15:19:30 = 5 Minutes
160GB: from 15:52:20 and 15:52:55 to 15:56:57 = 4 Minutes 37 Seconds
Difference : 23 Seconds or 8.3%

Section 3 : Loading GT5:P races (entirely off the HDD)
Variables:    - Arcade mode (offline)
        - '95 Suzuki Capuccino (green)
        - default settings for that track
        - 60GB model being played on an SDTV
        - 160GB being played in (EDIT) 1080p 480p

Eiger Nordwand (Chosen for its elaborate scenery)
60GB: loaded in approximately 12 seconds
160GB: loaded in approximately 9 seconds
Difference: 3 seconds or 33%

London (Chosen for the complexity and quantity of the surrounding buildings)
60GB: loaded in approximately 12 seconds
160GB: loaded in approximately (EDIT) 11 10 seconds
Difference: 2 second or 18%

Suzuka Circuit (Chosen because it is a 16 player race)
60GB: loaded in approximately 14 seconds
160GB: loaded in approximately (EDIT) 12 10 seconds
Difference: 4 seconds or 40%

Yep... am definatly getting bigger and possibly 7200RPM HDD soon.....

Wow, nice article. Do you have any plans on running any more benches with other games?

I'd also humbly suggest that if you do that this would be worthy of posting (with some editing for readibility) as in-house content if you brought it to the attention of TPTB.

Great job and thanks for the info. Definitely going to get the 7200rpm hdd when I decide to upgrade.

Not with blu-ray games because as stated before their similarities is probably caused by a bottleneck at the optical drive level. I don't want to exceed my bandwidth allowance for the month, so I limited myself to a couple of big examples. I have a few not yet installed demos on the 160GB unit, so I might just download them on the 60GB when the next billing period starts and test them out.

As for loading games, I would love to know other games that load large quantities of data from the HDD only at once such as GT5:P so that I can run that test. I'd rent the game if anyone has a suggestion.

Very nice article indeed.
I recently purchased an internal sata 2.5" hdd for the PS3.

I have decided that the overall goal for the purchase was to transfer my entire dvd collection onto the PS3.

So I went with the largest available 2.5" Hard drive: 500 GIGS

That is a half Terabyte in case you were wondering.

It is good to know about the advantages to buying an enclosure, (especially that lot about how Sony needs the original HDD for service, is that really true)

anyways, I look froward to the endless months it will take me to convert my dvd's.
but I have already started and I have about 5 or so movies ready to transfer.

The HD should come in the mail tomorrow, I can't wait.

As a scientist, I can't help challenging you with one major problem with your experimen: you didn't use the hard drives from the same company. J/K.

My god, Dogs, you really put a lot of efforts testing your new hard drive. Thanks for the detail information and buying suggestions. And those citations, wow, probably the first post ever at VGChartz :)

are SSDs supported by the PS3? if so they would be the fastest HDD available for the PS3 with no heat.

Yep.

Great article. Have you compared load times for games that require large installs? I could see a game like Heavenly Sword having improved load times because of the faster hard drive, given the extent of the install.

I would say compared DMC4, because that has an install of a whopping 5gbs(!), but it's load times are relatively non-existent as it is.