Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Blue SATAII 5400RPM 2.5IN 8MB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive WD3200BEVT

PLUSES: It's large, quiet, fast. It easily and perfectly fits where a 20-40-60-80 GB, 2.5" SATA drive would, including in a PS3. MINUSES: You may be able to find larger drives but not everyone may need more. Of course, it's no longer 'the biggest' but I knew that a couple of months ago, when I upgraded my PS3. I also figured that, since I have no plans of storing a movie library, 320 GB would carry me for the next couple of years. After that, it's likely that I'd be buying the next generation game/multimedia machine. Advice to the PS3 upgraders from someone who, after some hesitation, actually did it: - Go for the highest capacity. If it's a 2.5" SATA and you can afford it you should probably go with it. I already replaced my original PS3 drive with a 320GB but my formerly 60GB laptop has a 500GB 2.5" WD SATA now. - If you need to format this drive or any drive to Fat32, the best utility I found was FAT32FORMAT.EXE - Google and you shall find it out there. I'm not reviewing the formatter utility but I can tell you that it does a drive in less than 10 seconds AND it works on Vista. - It helps to have a 60-80 USB-connected drive handy to backup your PS3 content before upgrading. With one of these as the backup device, the PS3 fully restore EVERYTHING, including whatever copywrited or protected objects, such as, in my case the PS2 memory cards emulations. _______________________________________ Note (March 12, 2009) The Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT seems to be the way to go these days. I like WD and the 500GB is selling now for less than I paid for the 320GB. I actually helped a couple of friends upgrade with this drive and it was quick and easy. Note 2: (April 8, 2009) The review above was for the 320GB, which I used to upgrade my PS3. I just ordered the 500GB because life became almost unbearable with a 60GB on my laptop. I am planning to swap the drives without actually reinstalling the OS and the apps with help from Acronis True Image Home 2009 PC Backup & Recovery . Note 3: (April 12, 2009) - Laptop Upgrade My 2 year old Thinkpad T60 came with a wimpy 60GB SATA drive. I needed the ability to upgrade to the much larger 500GB and do it without having to reinstall the OS, apply the service packs and then reinstall and configure 100 different little apps. Acronis True Image Home 2009 PC Backup & Recovery allowed me to do all of the above in about one hour. Its Utilities section has a 'clone' option that would copy EVERYTHING, including the Master Boot Record/Sector (MBR) from the puny 60GB drive unto the 500GB while allowing me to control the size of the active partition - this while the 500GB was connected through a USB wire and the laptop booted off the program's CD. Once the operation completed (50 minutes) I simply removed the old 60GB drive off my laptop and replaced it with the 500GB drive. Once the laptop was turned back on it booted up happily, with a 200GB master partition and a 300GB second partition. There are 3 words that I have to use to describe the process: PERFECTION and COMPLETE SATISFACTION. This capability alone is worth the price of this product. To my surprise, with the new drive, the Primary Hard Disk score as computed by Microsoft (right click on 'My computer' then select 'Properties') jumped from a decent 4.8 to an unexpected 5.7.

First of all, there used to be two product listings for this hard drive, both identical except for the ASIN numbers. One was listed as the stand alone, the other was listed in the Western Digital Scorpio Blue page with the pull-down menu that has all the different sized drives in the series. I have no idea what the difference is. Amazon, for some reason, took down the 500 GB listing from the pull-down menu and it now has it's own page. Odd they chose that direction. It would have made more sense to remove the individual listing. Ok, this is for PS3 owners/upgraders. This drive fits the PS3 wonderfully and runs nice and cool with no issues. For the price you can't go wrong. I have the 40 GB PS3 (Spider Man 3 bundle) and have the data (saves + install) of about 10 games and I was running out of space. I did a lot of research of the various SATA 2.5" laptop hard drives available. I researched all the various brands and compared reviews and prices vs size. I came to the conclusion that a 500 GB drive for $100 is a steal given the extra space gained, so that's the direction I went. Of all the brands, the Western Digital Scorpio Blue series seemed to have the most positive reviews all over with the least amount of reviews stating drive failure, so that's the one I chose. Installing was extremely easy after backing up my data. The longest part of the whole procedure was backing up and restoring the data. I won't go into details, but I do recommend the app another reviewer used to format an external drive larger than 32GB in the FAT32 file system. It's called "fat32format". It works extremely well and extremely fast (less than 4 seconds for a 120GB external drive). Just follow the directions and you're good. I did this because in order for the PS3 to recognize the external drive it has to be formatted in the FAT32 file system. As for the procedure of upgrading the PS3, just google "upgrade PS3 hard drive" and you'll get tons of tutorials and videos. Now here's something important: A lot of people who upgraded their PS3's and saw xxx/465 GB free after upgrading are not realizing that this is not the fault of the PS3. You could put the same drive in a laptop and it will have the same 465GB. This is because manufacturers advertise a gigabyte as something different than what windows or the PS3 recognize. Manufacturers see a gigabyte (GB) as 1000 megabytes, and 1 megabyte (MB) as 1000 kilobytes (KB), when in actuality windows sees 1 MB as 1024 KB. So that's where the unaccounted lost space goes. So as of now, my opinion is that this hard drive is a great choice for PS3 upgrades. If you don't want to drop a bill on the 500GB version they also have the Scorpio Blues in smaller sizes for reduced prices. I like this hard drive so much I may replace my laptop hard drive with one.

I bought this purely to upgrade my PS3 from a 40GB drive to a 320GB drive. It installed fine, formatted fine, and appears to be working fine. The only issues I had was using the backup and restore functions on the PS3 itself, but that isn't the fault of the drive. For the record, don't really trust the backup part to do a good job. Mine would back up to my external 250GB drive that I was using just fine, but when I went to restore it, it would fail at about 17% in. It was like it was corrupt or something. So, I put back in my old drive and it too acted like the main boot part that held all the PS3 system info was corrupted, so I had to reinstall the firmware again, luckily it didn't mess up any of my saved data. Anyway, I called Sony to figure out what was going on with the backup. The guy didn't really know what the problem was (shocker) and told me that if it didn't work, to just put the old drive back in and copy things one by one with a thumb drive or something. Well, after about the 5th try it finally somewhat worked enough that I got most of the things I wanted off of it and I just re-downloaded the things it didn't copy. Moral to the story, don't expect something that is easy to be easy. Expect to have troubles. All in all, the drive itself is great. I don't hear it (didn't expect to be able to), it doesn't appear to get hot (but then again I never put my hands on the unit when it is running or the system itself. never did with the old drive either), and I don't get any lag or pauses or anything that I remember seeing people talk about on here before. So, if you want a bigger drive, go ahead and get this one. It will work fine. Just, like I said, don't expect the backup and restore function to work as easy as it appears it should. LOL

My Compaq Presario notebook had the hard drive fail. Although new PC's with these features fell in the under $400 range, I really didn't want to spend that much money to replace a notebook that was otherwise working well. I called a few local computer repair shops and the quotes over the telephone were just stupid $$. I am not a computer geek but am fairly handy so I thought I would try the repair myself. If I completely failed, I would not be out that much money. I ordered a full set of recovery discs from HP online that arrived in just a few days and I ordered a new hard drive and new RAM for the PC from Amazon. The install of the hardware was amazingly simple and the only tool needed was a small Phillips head screw driver. There are actually quite a few good instructional videos about the process on Youtube. The install of the operating system on the new hard drive was time consuming but not difficult. The only fly in the ointment was the RAM upgrade that I purchased. I bought a 4gig upgrade set and the original configuration of this notebook was 512K. The computer would not boot with both of the new RAM cards installed. After experimenting, I was only able to use one of the 2 gig RAM cards and one of the original 256K cards but this did get me 2.2gig of RAM, which did result in a faster machine. The end result was a notebook that has more hard drive storage, operates faster than before and I saved myself a boat load of cash. The hardware arrived quickly and as promised and I am once again a very satisfied Amazon customer.

This is a good hard drive for use in devices that need a laptop (2.5") sized drive. I'm personally using it for a Mac Mini, but it would also fit into most laptops. I bought it to expand from my original drive's 80 GB capacity, and installation and setup was a snap. This obviously has as much to do with using it on a Mac as the hard drive itself, but the drive was exactly what I needed. Performance seems to be as good or better than my original drive, which is a few years older. I don't use very large files often, so I haven't done any load testing, but the drive seems like it would be excellent for normal use.

I bought this to replace the miniscule 40 GB drive in my PS3, which I filled to capacity by merely playing PS3 games that required up to 6 GB of space to install. Why PS3 games require such a ridiculous amount of space is certainly a topic worthy of discussion, however, this is not the forum. Installing this hard drive was a breeze. For those who need help, a little instruction: 1. Use the PS3's backup feature to backup all your existing hard drive's information. Use a USB flash drive, external hard drive, or iPod (I used my 120 GB classic). 2. Unplug your PS3, then pop the hard drive cover off the PS3 using a small flat head screwdriver. 3. Unscrew the screws keeping your hard drive in place. This will take a small Philips screwdriver, the kind used for computers and the like. Don't use a big one unless you enjoy stripping screws and cursing a lot. 4. Pull the old hard drive out. Unscrew the other screws keeping it in place in its hard drive cage. 5. Pop the hard drive out of its cage. Put the new hard drive in the cage. Screw it in. 6. Put the cage back in place and screw it in. 7. Put the cover back on. 8. Plug your PS3 back in and turn it on. It will ask you to format. Go ahead, can't do any harm. 9. Use the PS3's internal restore feature to restore all the information you previously backed up. 10. SYNC YOUR TROPHY INFORMATION if you're interested in such things. I almost had a heart attack when I thought I'd lost all my trophies. Syncing with the server will put them all back in place. 11. Enjoy your massive new hard drive. 12. Think about how you might have compressed this list to maybe 4 or 5 steps instead of 12. 13. Or 13 for that matter. This hard drive is currently serving its purpose quite well. It's also noticeably quieter than the factory 40 GB, a big plus.

Like everyone else stated this is THE PS3 replacement hard drive. Whether you got the 60, 80 or 120 GB drive to start out with, you will quickly see (even if you are not a hard core gamer) that it will begin filling up. When you take into account all of the data you can store on your PS3 like pictures, music, etc. you also need to keep in mind that most games these days require a multi GB execution file be loaded onto your hard drive when you play them for the first time. Because of this, I noticed how my drive began filling up quickly (I have about 6 games and about 10 GB's of music and pictures) and before I noticed it I had 34 GB of space used. This drive and the installation process overall is extremely easy (less than 10 minutes excluding backup time) just please be careful and use a good small phillips screwdriver because the blue screw inside the PS3 that releases the drive casing as well as the 4 smaller screws that hold the drive in the casing are VERY EASY TO STRIP. It has proved to be extremely reliable and the PS3 fomatted it automatically when I booted up after installation. This should provide the casual to average gamer with plenty of room for quite a while. I would also recommend (as other reviews thankfully did) purchasing an external case for the old drive so you have a small but functional backup drive especially since this stuff should not end up in the trash. Reduce, re-use re-cycle as Jack Johnson says. PEACE

This is my second harddrive i bought from here. My first worked wonderfully in my Ps3 so good in fact i told my buddy about it and i ordered him one too. After installing his it worked for about two weeks and just died. I even put it in my Ps3 and it wont even give me a screen. So its kinda hard for me to rate this because mine works fine but my friends doesn't work at all. Maybe he just got a bad one but me personally i would purchase another if needed. I've had mine for well over a year now so i like it.