Cheapest/Easiest Solution for upgrading PS3 HD?

Hey everyone!

I have come to the position of not having enough space on my PS3 HD (80 gigs sure goes by fast lol). I was wondering if anybody has suggestions and solutions to upgrading that are cheap and easy. Is it difficult to switch everything over if you change out HDs? And I assume I can download everything I purchased again after a swap. Is a swap the best way to go, is it easy to do?

Let me know what you have done or what you suggest doing, thanks!

What size drive are you looking at? I have a spare 500gb Rocketfish (I'll have to check this one, not sure of the manufacturer) drive from Best Buy a while back that got replaced. I dont have any use for it, so if you want it just PM me.

As long as you have an older fat or a slim (just not the super slim, I'm not sure about those), you basically just need a screwdriver, maybe 2 different sizes. It's pretty much plug and play.

On the older fats, if I remember correctly, theres not even a drive enclosure to mess with, it's literally one screw, slide out the old slide in the new. On the older slim, there's a 4 screw enclosure the HDD is encased in after you pull it out.

The easiest thing to do, is delete all your games and game data. Just keep your saves, or games you can't redownload later. This way, you should be able to use a USB drive to easily back-up your stuff. After you get your back up squared away, just swap the drives. It's been awhile, but it should prompt you for what to do when you start it up. The second time i changed drives,  I didn't back up anything (I used the cloud save feature for my game saves), but then I found I had to download the latest firmware and upload that to USB stick or the new drive wouldn't format. The first time, I backed up like I stated above and everything worked seemlessly.

All your stuff should be redownloadable, but you may want to check. I had a TON of games and DLC to redownload and reinstall, and there were only 2 titles I couldn't download again without having the disc (Deadspace extraction, and MOH Frontline)

And, as I said, it's been awhile. You may not even have to delete stuff, you may just be able to check off what you want/dont want to be backed up. I think it tries to back up everything that's there though, if I recall.

It's kind of odd that Sony won't let us hook up a drive via USB, have the PS3 backup everything on to the new drive. Plug in the new drive into the system and run a in system  program. I do want a new drive as well, but I dont' want to play through some games again due to "copy protection."

I do not want to redownload everything again, because that would mean over 50GB of data to redownload, not cool if you have a slow connection or download cap.

Yeah, external drive support for games would have been great.

50 GB sucks on a slow connection, but it's really not that bad (unless you are capped). 750 GB on a fast connection is no joke itself. The worst part isn't the downloading, it's the installing and updating,  no ability to sort your downloads at all, and only 30-35 concurrent downloads allowed as well. All small stuff that adds up.