PS3 Gets 500 Gigabyte Hard Drive
Third party set to release first officially licensed external drive, in anticipation of upcoming DVR release.
Posted Feb 02, 2010 at 17:03, By Anoop Gantayat
PC hardware maker Buffalo is about to take new steps in official PlayStation licensing. The company announced today two external hard drives that have been granted official recognition from Sony. According to Buffalo, this is the first time Sony has granted licensing to hard drive peripherals, a move that comes in anticipation of March's release of PS3's "Torne" digital video recorder kit.
Both drives have 500GB capacity and connect to the PS3 via an included USB 2.0 cable. The ¥14,800 Piano Black HD-AV500U2/SC sits horizontally and has a meter on its front showing remaining space. The ¥11,800 Black HD-CL500U2/SC stands vertically but lacks the meter.
As with any licensed peripheral, official licensing here means that the devices meet certain qualifications stipulated by Sony. They're both pre-formatted in a FAT32 format, allowing for immediate connection to the PS3. In addition to being used as an external recording device for Torne, the drives can also be used for backup and restore of the PS3's internal hard drive, and for saving and playback of videos, pictures and music.
Of course, the PS3 is technically compatible with general external hard drives, so it's unclear if official licensing carries any real merit here.
Buffalo's neat little diagram showing how it's done.
In its statement announcing the hard drives today, Buffalo mentioned a couple of additional details about Torne. The device allows up to eight external hard drives to be registered. At most four external drives can be connected simultaneously.
The two Buffalo drives will be released some time next month. You can see full specs in Buffalo's press release.
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Reader Comments (showing 7 of 7)
lech @ 2010.02.03, 1:49
The official license probably does little more than give Buffalo an excuse to markup a 500GB HDD by about ¥5,000.
Rockgamer @ 2010.02.03, 2:04
Seriously, there is no reason to get this. You can get the same amount of space for way less or get way more space for the same price.
David_Macphail @ 2010.02.03, 2:12
OK, a few questions:
Can Game saves (Including the mandatory installs) be stored and read from this external hard drive (I ask because you only mentioned movies, pictures and music in your article)?
Will it launch in Europe?
When?
Rockgamer @ 2010.02.03, 4:06
From my personal experience with using external hard drives with the PS3, game saves cannot be saved directly to an external hard drive or read directly from it, they can only be transferred to and from it (and even then some games don't allow you to transfer saves).
So unless these official drives have some new features that change this (I doubt it, as they just seem like generic external hard drives), the same will probably apply to them as well.
airtoast @ 2010.02.03, 4:19
Sounds interesting, but the obvious questions are completely unanswered. With this "official" PS3 external hard drive, can you save game data (mandatory installs), game demos, purchased PSN games, and un-copyable game saves (such as Rock Band 2 and Godfather 1 and 2)? If so, this is an absolute must buy. If not, this is expensive junk, just buy a cheaper HDD somewhere else. And is this drive 5400 RPM or, hopefully, 7200 RPM? My day one 60GB PS3 has been full since the week I got it, and I'm sick and tired of constantly having to delete game install data. It's an incredible hassle not only because of all the time it takes, but also due to all the updates that have to be downloaded before re-installing. I'm not really interested in installing a new internal hard drive, so I hope this is actually what people have been asking for the past 3 years.
David_Macphail @ 2010.02.03, 4:29
I couldn't agree more, Airtoast. My PS3 HD is only 40 GB and with the news that White Knight Chronicles is going to take up 3.5 GB and Heavy Rain will be 4.2 GB it's just getting ridiculous.
Sony either need to allow you to store all your data on an external HDD or they need to stop developers from forcing mandatory installs on us.
Rockgamer @ 2010.02.03, 5:59
Just out of curiosity Airtoast, why aren't you interested in installing a new internal hard drive? I have one of the launch 60GB consoles as well, and by far putting in a 500GB hard drive is the best investment I've ever made in it.