A migration to safe pastures

So the big project I teased about a few posts back has been accomplished.  Yea!

For a while now I've been wanting to swap out the hard drive in my PS3 for a new one because, up until a few days ago, it still had the original drive that came with it!  I have the rare and sought after 60GB model that has the guts of the PS2 in it, allowing you to play not only PS3 games, but backwards compatible with PS2 and PS1 games too.

It was around a year ago when I realized I had a lot of games, videos, and other junk on my PS3 and I didn't want to lose it because of a hard drive failure, so I wanted to swap out the old 60GB HDD with a shiny new SSD for long term preservation.  The only problem was the price for SSDs, so because of that the project was always a low priority.  But all of that changed a few weeks ago when I saw one during a sale and it was one that wasn't very large in size, making the price even lower.  And by size I mean it was a 120GB SSD; tiny compared to modern standards that are creeping around the 1TB range.  But for me 120GB is good because it doubles what I already have.  Remember that it took nearly a decade for me to get close to filling 60GBs worth of space.

While it started off easy performing the swap, it quickly turned into a nightmare when one of the screws holding the HDD in the HDD cage wouldn't budge.  And while in the process of trying to get it out I accidently stripped the head of the screw.  It was pretty frustrating for about an hour not knowing what to do, but then I checked YouTube for a solution and saw a video showing someone with the same scenario I was in as that person demonstrated how they stripped a screw's head for the PS3 HDD and used a needle-nose plier to get the screw out.  So while not having needle-nose pliers at my place, I substituted by using a wrench, which got the job done with little effort.  After removing that screw, the rest was pretty much a cake walk.

In fact it was easier than what most people show online as I didn't have to do the weird part of updating the PS3 by downloading the firmware file from my PC to a thumb drive.  For whatever reason my PS3 kept the current version, my user account, and all of the settings like the screen resolution and Wi-Fi credentials.  All that was missing were the games, videos, saved data, etc.  For the backup, I saved it all to a 64GB flash drive I also bought during the online sale.  I've been needing a new one since my previous flash drive was only a 2GB, so using it as a way to back up my PS3 data to was a good excuse to buy a new one.

Another advantage for the SSD, since this PS3 is a backwards compatible model, I wanted to use it as a backup for my saved game data for both my PS1 and PS2 games, so over the last few days I've been copying all of my PS1 saves to the PS3.  It's a tedious task (having 8 cards to transfer), but an easy one to do.  Unfortunately my PS1 card is an unofficial one (a 32-in-1 memory card from Performance), so my PS3 can't see it.  This means I need to first use my PS2 to copy saves from the unofficial card to an official one and then copy the content from that to the PS3.  I'm almost finished with the PS1 saves and will soon work on copying a few PS2 memory cards too.

When it's all done, my PS3 should be an all-in-one for the first three generations of PlayStation consoles.  And thanks to the new SSD, I don't have to worry about moving parts like the platter and read/write head motors dying over time.  Hopefully this new SSD will last at least another 10 years.  In fact, I'm surprised that my PS1 memory card is still good, considering I bought that thing back in 1998!

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