PS3 [GUIDE] SSD for PlayStation 3

@4laZr3d Do NOT attempt to zeroing SSD like that. Because it will not removed all data and as result You wear off more media. Behind the scene, SSD controller doing titanic jobs in readdressing and writing data. The only safe method to clear it is using internal command called Advanced/Enhanced Secure Erase.
Code: 
sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdx
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass <password> /dev/sdx
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-erase-enhanced <password> /dev/sdx
  • "-I" is to see if drive is not frozen, if it is, then put computer at sleep then awake him and try again
  • You must set password to invoke ase/se atacmd
  • on some SSD, zeroing using ase/se is not possible because this atacm works different on them (like eg. changing encryption keys only)
  • some SSD not supporting "--security-erase-enhanced" but "--security-erase" only
 
Last edited:
Hello !

I've been using a "Samsung SSD 870 EVO MZ-77E500B/EU" 500Go since early August now, playing regularly (with my games copied on it) and it works like a charm !
Nothing bad to report.
 
This thread was a great resource for me so thought I'd add my install experience. I ended up going with a Crucial MX500 1TB SSD after reading multiple postive outcomes including feedback here. I dropped the new drive into my PS3 Slim however it failed to format. It would progress well to 90% then slow to a crawl. It took long enough for the PS3 to return messages advising the format was taking longer than expected. I eventually removed the drive and plugged it into my Windows 11 PC. I used Disk Management to initialise the drive and a third party tool to format it FAT32. It initialised/formatted without issue. I put it back into the PS3 and the drive format and 4.90 firmware load went off without a hitch. It's now working well. Cheers.
 
I bought a 240GB WD Green (WDS240G3G0A) last year and it pretty much bricked last night after pretty light usage over the year... Was installing a 2.5GB game which got really slow while installing (about 1% every 2 hours overnight) then the power cut out and I think the systems toast now LOL. I think it only had about 35GB of games including the installing one. Not a great experience.

I believe it's a QLC SSD like you said to avoid. I'm not sure I want to get another an SSD again after this. :(
 
@kacboy NAND Flash don't like to be very rarely used. Charge can jumps to another cells, which results in broken data (for the same reason SSD cannot be used as trustworthy so called cold storage). So who knows. But thank You for report! ^^
 
@Berion Luckily my original drive was still untouched and I was able to boot from it right away, just had to redownload a couple cloud saves.

Would something like a WD Blue end up the slowing down the same way with irregular usage? Or does it have some sort of wear-leveling built in compared to the green? Thinking of getting a hybrid drive or just a newer regular HDD instead.
 
@kacboy This happens to all NAND memory. It does not physically breaking it, but breaking data. In SHDD (or HHD, or FD, whatever You call it) NAND usage is only as cache - which contents doesn't matter because they will be overwritten anyway, during normal disk usage.
 
Great write-up of the issue. At this point, in my location, a 1TB SDD costs about the same as a 2.5 inch 1TB HDD and for smaller capacities SSDs are flat out cheaper, so this sort of guide is very useful for me and and in the near future will probably become even more relevant for others too.

Though I think I have to note that HDDs also can have minor incompatibility/performance issues, with some drives not being able to play back most cutscenes without stuttering.
 
@YA BOI Thanks.
Interesting. Never heard about that. Worth to exclude damages by checking S.M.A.R.T first on those potentially affected drives.
 
Berion said:
@4laZr3d Do NOT attempt to zeroing SSD like that. Because it will not removed all data and as result You wear off more media. Behind the scene, SSD controller doing titanic jobs in readdressing and writing data. The only safe method to clear it is using internal command called Advanced/Enhanced Secure Erase.
Code: 
sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdx
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass <password> /dev/sdx
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-erase-enhanced <password> /dev/sdx
  • "-I" is to see if drive is not frozen, if it is, then put computer at sleep then awake him and try again
  • You must set password to invoke ase/se atacmd
  • on some SSD, zeroing using ase/se is not possible because this atacm works different on them (like eg. changing encryption keys only)
  • some SSD not supporting "--security-erase-enhanced" but "--security-erase" only
Click to expand...
Why so agressive? That's what the `blkdiscard` command is for. :)
 
@Berion Happened to me me on a brand new 1TB Seagate drive that I took out of a external HDD enclosure, and no amount of file system restore or other fixes helped.

There are forum/reddit posts floating about similar issues. And the OP of this thread sounds like has pretty much the same issues https://gbatemp.net/threads/ps3-slim-1terabyte-hdd-stuttering-hdd-too-big.534408/

Now that there is some parity of both SSDs and HDDs (though SSD prices fluctuate over time) the general advice that I would give is that you use what is lying around first and only then procure a new HDD/SSD. HDDs are not that abundant anymore and as you noted SSDs can have their risks too.
 
Berion said:
@YA BOI Judging by last message, sounds like 4K sector size problem, not capacity.
https://www.psx-place.com/threads/t...decryption-on-linux.23308/page-16#post-377362
Click to expand...
I mean I know that it is not the capacity, otherwise a whole lot more people would complain about this issue. Also seems something that you can't really fix unless you have some sort of utility with which you can manually set the block size while formatting the drive for PS3. Or will the PS3 just use whatever block size you chose for the fat32 partition?

I just swapped in a older 500 GB laptop drive that hopefully does the trick.
 
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