Playstation 3 HDD Upgrade

[ProblemSolver]

@Rob:
I think you also have more data on your disk since December, right? It's not
your disc, it's the PS3s filesystem. The system slows considerably down as
more files you store on it. I also think there isn't any defragmentation or
something. One thing is for sure, the PS3s filesystem was built for security
and not for efficiency. However, with the ever increasing capacity, Sony
needs to increase the performance of the filesystem anytime soon.

[morfeo378]

I have installed a 250 gb, but from the hard drive installed I have a lot more stoppages of the image online racing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9spGr-wwoXA

time 7.16

[infoxicated]

@ProblemSolver I don't have that much more data, or at least my data density isn't as high as it was on the old 60Gb drive - that was almost 90% full, while there's probably about 100Gb on the new drive.

What's annoying is seeing the icons spinning without any obvious reason why they're doing it. I can have a game load freeze up on me, but if I press the PS button twice it snaps out of it and normal service is resumed.

Think I'd have been better going for a 100Gb SSD drive than the 500Gb one, as it's so slow that I can't be bothered storing much on it. That said, I did get a bog standard one - it only has 8Mb of cache, which is meagre by modern standards.

[blackwiggle]

NO!!!!
Don't get a Solid State Drive!!!!
They are so unreliable for one thing and secondly they only have a finite life.
I've had a fair bit of experience with these drives.
The way they work, the only reasonable situation that they could be used is for a PC's OS ONLY, NOT to store data that is going to moved about, or rewritten several times.
They also need a new version of a INTEL SSD driver software to operate properly, something you can't install in a PS3.
Plus it's impossible to defrag a SSD in a PC, they stop working if you try, all windows OS need you to tick a box telling it that that a SSD is install exactly so it won't attempt to do it.

I couldn't think of a worse combination of a PS3 and a SSD, it really would be a nightmare.

[Darkdrium777]

You sure about that SSD defragmentation? I have Diskeeper 2010 and here's what is says about SSDs:



I know it doesn't say if it does a defrag or not, but it doesn't say it doesn't. It still talks about optimization.

[blackwiggle]

It's best if I explain a few basic differences between how SSD's work, then I'll point out what the problems are.

SSD use flash memory, drives store the information either in single bit or two bit's [SLC = Single level cell or MLC = Multi level cell], most new ones use MLC.
These cells are the building blocks of a SSD and are arranged into pages, the average size page is 4kb.
These pages are combined to form blocks, with the most common block being 128 pages = 512kb.
SSD's can read and write to a single page [4kb] at a time, but here's the problem, they can only erase a block [128 pages] at a time.

Problems
Slowing down over time.
Once a page is full it can't simply be overwritten like a HDD, the SSD must first erase the page before it can write to it again, but to delete a small bit it has to delete a whole 512kb block, it has to find space to put that block, it doesn't take long for this process to slow your SSD to a snails pace.
Also the reason why you can never fill a SSD as it will always need space to write to.
There is a new spec called TRIM that needs both the OS and the SSD manufactures support to work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM
This addresses some of these problems but few drives support it at the moment, the ones that do are around 5-6 times faster than those that don't

SSD Failure and Defragging problem
Each of the MOSFETS, the cells that store the bits can only be written to between 10,000 and 100,000 times, that's if they aren't faulty when you buy one, it only takes one chip to fail in the drive and it's stuffed and I've seen over a 30% failure rate in the first 2-3 months atm
Since the flash cells have a finite life, erasing and writing to them unnecessarily [by defragging] is going to shorten their lifespan, when you factor in that they can only erase large chucks of data at a time this problem is compounded.

INTEL came out with the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface [NVMHCI] to replace the ATA interface specifically to boost the take up of SS technology.
I'm not sure if it made it into Windows 7, it was still being debated, but I know Windows 7 automatically spots a SSD and disables the ability to defrag for that drive.

As I mentioned before, I wouldn't recommend using a SSD for anything other than purely as a separate drive for the OS.
In that capacity they are blindingly fast, and will speed up everything you do, and as long as the actual chips don't fail inside them which is still a real problem till manufactures get this sort from the experience I've had with them.

[amplificated]

Most decent SSD's are designed to be able to run without extra software being necessary. It shouldn't be that big of a deal. SLC SSD's don't have a finite life, and from my experience (I have a 128GB MLC drive in my PC), SSD has drastically improved speeds for loading programs, file transfers and general system snappiness. Had it for 4 months without issue, and it's my first SSD. Looking at its health in CrystalDiskInfo, it's at 98%. The SSD is my -only- drive for my PC, and while I've taken steps to minimise the number of unnecessary writes, I aren't changing how I use my computer to avoid them.

Even without TRIM, 10k-100k writes per cell would take 4-5 years of above average COMPUTER use to build up enough bad blocks to impact performance. Most people don't use their PS3's nearly as much as their computers, either.

Defragging: everything that needs to be said about this is that it doesn't offer a single benefit since the drives all have a seek time of less than 0.1ms regardless of where data is stored on the disk; and as Wiggle said, it just wears the drive out faster.

Since the PS3's successor will be arriving within 3 years, I really don't think there would be much issue with installing an SSD. You could just back your data up and transfer it to a cheap drive if you still wanted to hold onto the PS3 and repurpose the SSD for something else.

There's no need to panic about installing an SSD in a PS3... especially if you somehow get your hands on an SLC drive, since they suffer none of the wear issues MLC does (but they're nearly twice the price for equivalent sizes).