Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Blue SATAII 5400RPM 2.5IN 8MB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive WD3200BEVT

PLUSES: It's large, quiet, fast. It easily and perfectly fits where a 20-40-60-80 GB, 2.5" SATA drive would, including in a PS3.MINUSES: You may be able to find larger drives but not everyone may need more.Of course, it's no longer 'the biggest' but I knew that a couple of months ago, when I upgraded my PS3. I also figured that, since I have no plans of storing a movie library, 320 GB would carry me for the next couple of years. After that, it's likely that I'd be buying the next generation game/multimedia machine.Advice to the PS3 upgraders from someone who, after some hesitation, actually did it:- Go for the highest capacity. If it's a 2.5" SATA and you can afford it you should probably go with it. I already replaced my original PS3 drive with a 320GB but my formerly 60GB laptop has a 500GB 2.5" WD SATA now.- If you need to format this drive or any drive to Fat32, the best utility I found was FAT32FORMAT.EXE - Google and you shall find it out there. I'm not reviewing the formatter utility but I can tell you that it does a drive in less than 10 seconds AND it works on Vista.- It helps to have a 60-80 USB-connected drive handy to backup your PS3 content before upgrading. With one of these as the backup device, the PS3 fully restore EVERYTHING, including whatever copywrited or protected objects, such as, in my case the PS2 memory cards emulations._______________________________________Note (March 12, 2009)The Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 8 MB Cache, 5400 RPM SATA II WD5000BEVT seems to be the way to go these days. I like WD and the 500GB is selling now for less than I paid for the 320GB. I actually helped a couple of friends upgrade with this drive and it was quick and easy.Note 2: (April 8, 2009)The review above was for the 320GB, which I used to upgrade my PS3. I just ordered the 500GB because life became almost unbearable with a 60GB on my laptop. I am planning to swap the drives without actually reinstalling the OS and the apps with help from Acronis True Image Home 2009 PC Backup & Recovery.Note 3: (April 12, 2009) - Laptop UpgradeMy 2 year old Thinkpad T60 came with a wimpy 60GB SATA drive. I needed the ability to upgrade to the much larger 500GB and do it without having to reinstall the OS, apply the service packs and then reinstall and configure 100 different little apps.Acronis True Image Home 2009 PC Backup & Recovery allowed me to do all of the above in about one hour. Its Utilities section has a 'clone' option that would copy EVERYTHING, including the Master Boot Record/Sector (MBR) from the puny 60GB drive unto the 500GB while allowing me to control the size of the active partition - this while the 500GB was connected through a USB wire and the laptop booted off the program's CD.Once the operation completed (50 minutes) I simply removed the old 60GB drive off my laptop and replaced it with the 500GB drive. Once the laptop was turned back on it booted up happily, with a 200GB master partition and a 300GB second partition. There are 3 words that I have to use to describe the process: PERFECTION and COMPLETE SATISFACTION. This capability alone is worth the price of this product.To my surprise, with the new drive, the Primary Hard Disk score as computed by Microsoft (right click on 'My computer' then select 'Properties') jumped from a decent 4.8 to an unexpected 5.7.

First of all, there used to be two product listings for this hard drive, both identical except for the ASIN numbers. One was listed as the stand alone, the other was listed in the Western Digital Scorpio Blue page with the pull-down menu that has all the different sized drives in the series. I have no idea what the difference is. Amazon, for some reason, took down the 500 GB listing from the pull-down menu and it now has it's own page. Odd they chose that direction. It would have made more sense to remove the individual listing.Ok, this is for PS3 owners/upgraders. This drive fits the PS3 wonderfully and runs nice and cool with no issues. For the price you can't go wrong. I have the 40 GB PS3 (Spider Man 3 bundle) and have the data (saves + install) of about 10 games and I was running out of space. I did a lot of research of the various SATA 2.5" laptop hard drives available. I researched all the various brands and compared reviews and prices vs size. I came to the conclusion that a 500 GB drive for $100 is a steal given the extra space gained, so that's the direction I went. Of all the brands, the Western Digital Scorpio Blue series seemed to have the most positive reviews all over with the least amount of reviews stating drive failure, so that's the one I chose.Installing was extremely easy after backing up my data. The longest part of the whole procedure was backing up and restoring the data. I won't go into details, but I do recommend the app another reviewer used to format an external drive larger than 32GB in the FAT32 file system. It's called "fat32format". It works extremely well and extremely fast (less than 4 seconds for a 120GB external drive). Just follow the directions and you're good. I did this because in order for the PS3 to recognize the external drive it has to be formatted in the FAT32 file system. As for the procedure of upgrading the PS3, just google "upgrade PS3 hard drive" and you'll get tons of tutorials and videos.Now here's something important: A lot of people who upgraded their PS3's and saw xxx/465 GB free after upgrading are not realizing that this is not the fault of the PS3. You could put the same drive in a laptop and it will have the same 465GB. This is because manufacturers advertise a gigabyte as something different than what windows or the PS3 recognize. Manufacturers see a gigabyte (GB) as 1000 megabytes, and 1 megabyte (MB) as 1000 kilobytes (KB), when in actuality windows sees 1 MB as 1024 KB. So that's where the unaccounted lost space goes.So as of now, my opinion is that this hard drive is a great choice for PS3 upgrades. If you don't want to drop a bill on the 500GB version they also have the Scorpio Blues in smaller sizes for reduced prices. I like this hard drive so much I may replace my laptop hard drive with one.

I bought this purely to upgrade my PS3 from a 40GB drive to a 320GB drive. It installed fine, formatted fine, and appears to be working fine. The only issues I had was using the backup and restore functions on the PS3 itself, but that isn't the fault of the drive. For the record, don't really trust the backup part to do a good job. Mine would back up to my external 250GB drive that I was using just fine, but when I went to restore it, it would fail at about 17% in. It was like it was corrupt or something. So, I put back in my old drive and it too acted like the main boot part that held all the PS3 system info was corrupted, so I had to reinstall the firmware again, luckily it didn't mess up any of my saved data. Anyway, I called Sony to figure out what was going on with the backup. The guy didn't really know what the problem was (shocker) and told me that if it didn't work, to just put the old drive back in and copy things one by one with a thumb drive or something. Well, after about the 5th try it finally somewhat worked enough that I got most of the things I wanted off of it and I just re-downloaded the things it didn't copy. Moral to the story, don't expect something that is easy to be easy. Expect to have troubles.All in all, the drive itself is great. I don't hear it (didn't expect to be able to), it doesn't appear to get hot (but then again I never put my hands on the unit when it is running or the system itself. never did with the old drive either), and I don't get any lag or pauses or anything that I remember seeing people talk about on here before. So, if you want a bigger drive, go ahead and get this one. It will work fine. Just, like I said, don't expect the backup and restore function to work as easy as it appears it should. LOL