I'm confused about the PS3 and which types there are, can you help?

I think the only models still being manufactured are the Slim 120 and the new Slim 250. I’m having boatloads of difficulty finding any online retailer that still has the Slim 120 in stock. Though as of yesterday, Amazon would still let you buy it from them and they’d send you an email when they had more in stock.

@MrItty Thanks a lot. That sucks unfortunately though :( Do you have a PS3? Is it to your expectations?

@Blackberry not yet. I was planning on buying the 120 from Amazon using all the Amazon GCs I got for Christmas. Imagine my annoyance on 12/26 to see they were out of stock….

@MrItty Oh damn, I hope you get it soon :)

I’d get the larger capacity 250.

Pretty much every game installs 4–5gb. Add on to that downloads from PSN (including HD movies) and then ripping DVD’s to play on it etc and it soon fills up.

I started out with an 80Gb HD and had filled up in about 3 months (on the bright side sony give you instructions to upgrade the HD yourself).

@Lightlyseared Oh I see, the PS3 installs the game and/or movie on the HD? So you don’t have to keep putting the disc in or something? And even if you use an external HD to view movies, it still installs them on the PS3 HD?

@Blackberry that’s not my understanding. The disc is needed to play games. What’s stored on the HD is save data (ie, so you can pick up where you left off). And as for movies, you’re downloading “extras” from BDLive and/or PlayStation Network. You’re not storing the actual movie on the hard drive.

@MrItty Oh ok I see now. Thanks a lot :) I was having a blank moment and realized that you don’t need memory cards anymore lol.

Also, I’m glad I do research because I found out Sony is being sued for this widespread ‘update problem’ some people are having. I hope they get this fixed soon so I can feel safer about buying one: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/10/sony-sued-over-ps3-update-that-supposedly-bricks-consoles.ars

@MrItty You haven’t got that quite correct. You need the disc to play the game but some games also install a large chunk of regularly needed data to the HD. This is on top of the save data file (for example GTA4 stores a 4GB “game data file” and then save game data at about 1Mb). These are stored into different folders on the PS3 HD.

Also if you download a HD film from the Playstation store you are storing the entire film on your HD just like if download a movie from itunes you have to store the entire file on your computer.

The PS3 can read data of external HD’s but it doesn’t recognise HD’s formatted to NFTS (the windows standard) which is a bit of a pain thinking about it now this probably explians why all the installs are just under 4GB

@Lightlyseared I stand corrected. Thank you.

It depends what you’re using it for. I have a simple 40gb PS3, and it works fine for me. I pretty much only play games on it (very little internet downloading/usage, and no movies are stored on it… I have a computer for that nonsense). They are right that many PS3 games will store regularly needed info on the hard drive, but I’ve not even come close to filling mine.

Also if you plan on pulling out old playstation 1 and 2 games for nostalgia’s sake (as I did) keep in mind the lower memory ones won’t play certain ps1 games or ps2 games. Mine for instance will not play any PS2 games (that I’ve tried anyways), but has no issues playing PS1 games (again, any that I’ve tried anyways). Thankfully I still have my old PS2 on hand to fill that urge.

Have fun, and hopefully you never use xbox again, I know I never will.

@westy81585 Thank you : )