How to Speed Up the Playstation 3
Back in September, the fine folks at DL.TV showed you how to replace the PS3's hard drive with a bigger one. It's easy—if you have a 2.5-inch form factor SATA hard drive, it's just a matter of turning a few small screws and sliding it in there. The hardest part is making sure your large disk is formatted with FAT32 first, which can be a challenge in Windows (there are lots of freeware apps that will format large FAT32 partitions on Windows, though).
But changing out your PS3 hard disk for another bit of rotating magnetic storage is kids stuff. We've already raved about the stellar performance of Intel's new X-25 solid-state drive, which just happens to come in an 80GB capacity and 2.5-inch SATA form factor. Perfect for a PS3!
So after a quick FAT32 format, we dropped the drive in the PS3 unit we keep in the HDTV lab here (an original 60GB unit) to see what kind of impact it has on install times, game start times, and load times. We took four games notorious for long installs or load times and timed them both with the original 60GB hard drive and the Intel SSD. The results may surprise you—but at $600, it's certainly not a cheap upgrade.
Install Speed
There's a lot to love about the PS3, but install times isn't one of them. Many games require lengthy installs before you get to play, and after waiting an eternity for a large demo to download, you get to stare at a progress bar while it installs. Yuck. Does the speedy 80GB Intel X-25 SSD speed this up?
The short answer is—not really. Installing games from the Blu-ray disc to the hard drive is sometimes a little faster with the SSD drive, but only by a very small amount. The limiting factor here is clearly the read performance of the Blu-ray drive (which is the entire reason so many games require hard disk installs in the first place). The Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway demo does install about 40% faster, though. This is a downloaded demo, reading the download package off the hard drive, so the Blu-ray read speed isn't an issue.
If you want to cut those five-minute-plus install times down to a tolerable level, a faster hard drive or SSD isn't the way to go. In fact, with the Blu-ray drive being the limitation here, we're not sure there is much you can do about it.
Start Times
What about game start times? Different games get you into the action in different ways, so here's the breakdown of how we tested this lot:
- Mercenaries 2—the time to start a new game after choosing a character.
- Grand Theft Auto IV—the time to start a new game from the title screen to the beginning of the intro movie.
- Devil May Cry 4—the time from the main PlayStation menu into the title screen.
- Grand Turismo 5 Prologue—the time from the PlayStation menu to the title screen.
There are improvements across the board, and they're quite substantial. A good ballpark for what you can expect is a 30% improvement in start times, but the range we saw is anywhere from around 25% faster to 40% faster.
Load Times
How about loading a game? Again, each game is a little different so we measured different criteria.
- Mercenaries 2—the time to load a game saved right outside the cantina directly after the intro mission.
- Grand Theft Auto IV—the time to get into the game when saved at Roman's first apartment, starting when the Rockstar logo appears.
- Devil May Cry 4—the time from the main menu into the game, when saved at the start of Mission 2 (directly after the intro level).
- Grand Turismo 5 Prologue—the time to start a new Arcade race with all the default settings.
GTA IV's improvement is surprisingly small—it's quite possible that there really isn't a whole lot of loading going on during some of those first logos, and the game could get you in faster if it wanted to. Everything else gets a lot faster, though. Load times go up anywhere from 33% to over 40% on the other titles.
Is It Worth It?
Okay, so the long and short of it is this: Swapping out that PS3 hard drive for one of Intel's X-25 solid-state drives won't do much to improve install times from game discs, but it will improve install times from downloaded games and most game startup and load times by anywhere from 25–40%, depending on the situation.That's a huge improvement, but is it worth it? This 80GB drive costs in the $660–700 range, which is considerably more than the PS3 itself. Considering that the base PS3 model these days is the $400 unit that already has an 80GB hard drive, you're not even trading up to higher capacity unless you happened to buy an older 60GB unit or the bargain 40GB unit. And it's a downgrade if you got the 160GB Drake's Fortune bundle pack.
So no, clearly it doesn't really make economic sense to swap out the PS3's hard drive for a solid-state drive just yet. SSD prices have to plummet quite a bit before that happens. But we see people spend money to trick out their PS3s all the time, with laser etching and all sorts of crazy stuff. If you have money to burn, this is a neat way to spend it on something that will actually make one of the pain points of the PS3 a bit more tolerable. Besides, it's just cool.
