How to Connect an External Hard Drive to a PlayStation 3
The PlayStation 3 makes a great multimedia center for your home entertainment system, allowing you to view photos and movies, listen to music and play games, all from one device. The internal hard drive space, however, is quickly used up when used to store high-definition movies and large music libraries. Adding an external hard drive can easily solve this problem, and is more or less plug and play, aside from the need to format the drive to be correctly recognized. With an external drive, the sky is the limit for storage, and you can quickly and easily transfer files between a computer and your PS3.
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Instructions
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Connect the external drive to your computer via its USB connections. Make sure the drive is connected to any external power supplies and turned on. The computer should recognize the drive.
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Format the drive to the FAT32 file system by selecting "Run" from the Start menu and typing "CMD." Click "OK" to open the command prompt.
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Type "format /FS:FAT32 X:" into the command line. Replace "X" with the letter assigned to your external drive, and press "Enter." Confirm that you wish to format the drive and the computer will proceed to do so.
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Alternatively, you can download a program such as SwissKnife to format the drive without going through the command line. Make sure you set the drive to format to the FAT32 file system.
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Go to "My Computer" and open the external drive after it is done formatting. Create four folders, and label each identically to the folders located on the PS3 internal drive. These will be "Photo," "Video," "Music" and "Game."
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Eject the drive from the computer and disconnect the USB cable.
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Connect the drive to your PS3 using one of the available USB ports.
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Power on the PS3, and the drive will now be recognized as one of the PS3's storage devices.
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Tips & Warnings
If you do not wish to use the entire space of the external drive for use with your PS3, you can use a program such as SwissKnife to format a partition of your drive to FAT32, while keeping a separate partition in the NTFS Windows file system.
Formatting a drive will delete any information stored on it. Be sure to back up any important files.
