As I mentioned yesterday, I was planning to replacing the hard disk drive in my PS3™ with a larger SSD I had laying around my desk.

Once I had formatted a large USB stick with FAT32 (see yesterday’s blog post) the process was relatively straight forward. I’ve added rough times to complete each step, but note that all over 5 minutes are a “go away and leave the progress bar to crawl across the screen” situation:

  1. (1h 20m) Backup using the system’s backup utility.
  2. (15m) Sync trophies with PlayStation Network - unless you have had PlayStation Plus subscription, automatic sync it not available on the PS3™ so this has to be done manually.
  3. (5m) Turn off the system and physically swap the disks.
  4. (1m) Turn the system back on - it will complain that it cannot find the system software.
  5. (1h) Follow the instructions for reinstalling PlayStation 3 System Software. The system update software can be downloaded from Sony’s support pages - I used the same USB stick as for the backup, so the PS3 folder already existed and I just had to create the UPDATE folder.
  6. (1h 15m) Restore the backup using the system’s backup utility.
  7. (15m) Sync trophies back from PSN.