External harddrive for PS3 - Off-Topic

#1 Posted by EPGPX (271 posts) - 6 months, 12 days ago

I bought a WD passport thinking I would be able to use it with the PS3 so I can backup all the content and saves and etc. but it didn't work because its NTFS and so I want to buy a hard drive that will work with my PS3. Can anybody recommend me anything I can buy at Best Buy that will work with the PS3 right off the bat and none of that converting my ntfs hdd to fat32 bull? I just want to buy and it be compatible with PS3. Do they even make fat32 external hdd anymore?

#2 Edited by Toxeia (658 posts) - 6 months, 12 days ago

NTFS or Fat32 are format styles. You can connect the hard drive to your computer, go to My Computer, right click on it, select "Format" and select Fat32 in there. Problem solved. If the issue is that you want to use that hard drive for other stuff, then you can partition it. If you're on windows, open up your start menu and type "diskmgmt.msc" and hit enter. From there you can partition the portable hard drive.

And no, no one sells Fat32 hard drives anymore. Thumb drives are Fat32 though. The biggest issue with Fat32 is that it doesn't support files larger than 4GB. There's also some jazz about file security and special permissions, but that won't be of any interest to you.

#3 Posted by Subject2Change (2871 posts) - 6 months, 12 days ago

You won't be able to format the drive FAT32 with Windows, it's a very dated file system and requires a program to do so. Otherwise it won't format the entire drive.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/WD-FAT32-Formatter.shtml

I believe is what I used to format my 750GB drive to FAT32. And I use the drive to do PS3 back ups to, as well as I copy media to it to play on my PS3.

#4 Posted by EPGPX (271 posts) - 6 months, 12 days ago

Why doesn't the PS3 and Xbox 360 accept the NTFS file system?

#5 Posted by BlackLagoon (1025 posts) - 6 months, 12 days ago

@EPGPX: Because it's far more complicated than FAT32, and a bit of an overkill for a console. Also it's a proprietary Microsoft technology, and wasn't really well-supported outside of Windows until fairly recently (MacOS apparently didn't get full read/write support until 2009). I doubt Sony considers it worthwhile to the work to add it the PS3 at this point, though maybe they will include it in their next console.