I have an original 80 gig model, with a 500 gig drive and 17 blade fan installed. The first time she YLOD-ed I got the iFixit kit, fixed it up good. Several months later it died again, this time I got IC Diamond thermal compound vs ceramic.

She died again a month or so ago, I reapplied the compound but didn't have as much as last time, and now she's died again.

So, should I buy a slim model to replace her? Is that worth it with rumors of the PS4 brewing?

Can I take my 500 gig drive out of my fat girl and put it into the slim one, in order to save my saves and information?

Nope, you can't just put in that old hard drive into the new one since it'll reformat it once you put it in, thus all of your shit will be gone. If you had a PSN+ account and had whatever game saves you had in the cloud beforehand, you can access your save files and I think that's about it.

You might need to get that thing fixed up again so you can connect your old PS3 into a new one, with an ethernet cable so you can transfer everything from it. That's what I had to do to save my data.

So far as the PS4 goes, I guess it depends on how much you want to use it. If you can wait a couple months, maybe wait until E3 and see what they announce. If not, well, the Slims are, well, not cheap, but not super expensive, especially if you can find a deal (which are fairly common).

But I think that the absolute earliest the PS4 might get released is 2013, and there's no saying that it'll be backwards compatible. It might be, it might not. Probably not, if the rumors about it not having a Cell are true (conversely, they are just rumors, so who knows).

Edit: E3 is also a good time to announce price cuts. Probably not anything significant this year, but you never know. Unless you need to play something soon, I think waiting is probably your best bet, unless you can find a really good deal at a store.

@rjayb89: Really? I have a fat and a slim and when I first got the slim I backed up all the data on the fatty to an external drive and then did the ethernet swap, but I have used the external hard drive on both systems since then, moving various saves around, and I think all that backup data is still on it. What did I do? Maybe I'm mistaken.

@pyromagnestir: I didn't have an external hard drive at the time so it was a little more bothersome in my case.

Hey, if you have an external hard drive, it's probably easier. =P

My "fatty" died this past Christmas. I just bought a slim and went on with my life. It's much quieter than my 60 gig launch model. I didn't bother getting it fixed since I read that the average additional life span for a repaired unit is 10 months. Honestly, I never bothered to look after any old saves and such so I don't know how that works. I do know that I had no trouble re-downloading all the D2D games I purchased off PSN once I signed into my account on the new unit.

@rjayb89: Oh, now I get it, I think. When I saw talk of 500 gig hard drives and what not I assumed external hard drives and you mean internal ones? Is that it? Swapping the original into the new slim? That would explain my confusion.

Cool. I did just get my hands on my friends old PS2, so while I'd be sad to loose the backwards compatibility, not that I play much PS2 these days anyway, I'd still have that old system to rock out some Kingdom Hearts on.

So, I'll start looking around for the Slim in the near future.

@pyromagnestir: Yeah, swapping the new hard drive from the new PS3 from the old PS3 with the old one. It's confusing while I'm typing it actually. Just don't expect the new PS3 to welcome the old hard drive as if it's, well, fuck, dude. Just don't put a hard drive into the new one, leave whatever's in there because it'll reformat it and fuck that. Transfer it across PS3s with an ethernet cable or back up the data on the old one and restore it from the new PS3. Jesus Christ.

I understood what you meant.

Who knows when the PS4 will actually be released. And I wouldn't count on being able to play your PS3 games on the PS4. I'd just get the Slim. Sorry to hear about your fat.

You won't be able to buy a PS4 until 2014, 2013 at the very earliest, so you will have a long wait. It may even be a wasted wait as there is no guarantee that the PS4 will play PS3 games.

This exact thing just happened to me as well. Fatty worked for about a month, then I fired up GT5 and couldn't handle the 6th lap on Rome circuit. Now its YLOD again. :(

Think I'll try to get a slim for cheap somewhere and then somehow get my data over to the new one. Anyone know the best way to do that? Should I remove the HDD and use my PC to backup the data somehow?

The hard drive reformatting is a super bummer. A shame Sony wouldn't just let an existing formatted drive just work. Whats the harm really?