External Hard Drive

[ParadigmDawg]

Which external HD do I need to get for my Brother In Law? He is just getting into this (He's the one that bought my NHT 2.5s) and wants to use a PS3 with an external HD to stream music the way I used to. Probably just needs 250-500GB and he doesn't have much extra spare money.

Or would something like an AirPort Express be a better option?

 

[j_garcia]

How much is not a lot of spare? You can get 1TB under $100 right now. As you drop down in size, the cost/GB goes up actually, but I feel about 500G are about right and is about $70-80 average, sometimes a little better. You can find deals on 250s and 320s though, in the $50 range sometimes. What about a bigger internal drive for the PS3 and store them directly on there?

 

[ParadigmDawg]

He would be good right at 100 bucks. He needs an external HD for other use too so don't want to go the PS3 HD route. Will all HDs work ok with PS3?

I did an edit and asked about AirPort Express too.

How much is not a lot of spare? You can get 1TB under $100 right now. As you drop down in size, the cost/GB goes up actually, but I feel about 500G are about right and is about $70-80 average, sometimes a little better. You can find deals on 250s and 320s though, in the $50 range sometimes. What about a bigger internal drive for the PS3 and store them directly on there?

 

[j_garcia]

All USB drives should work with the PS3 with one small caveat - they have to be formated FAT32, which requires a little application to do (free) for larger drives. I have a 320 just for this as well, and I transfer stuff to and from my PCs on the same drive. There's a 320G Seagate at Frys for $59 right now. My mom just bought one the other day and she had no issues setting it up - and she's not a hardware kind of person (even though it should be plug and play )

I am not familiar with the airport express, so can't help you on that one.

If the PS3 is connected to a network, he can stream from any PC on the network, it just needs to be enabled to do so between the PC and the PS3.

 

[ParadigmDawg]

Oh wait, if he is streaming from WMP11 it's not even using space on the PS3 is it? If so, he just needs a HD large enough to hold 4,000 pictures so he doesn't lose them we he re-configs his laptop. Am I looking at this right? What size HD would hold a lot of pictures?

All USB drives should work with the PS3 with one small caveat - they have to be formated FAT32, which requires a little application to do (free) for larger drives. I have a 320 just for this as well, and I transfer stuff to and from my PCs on the same drive. There's a 320G Seagate at Frys for $59 right now. My mom just bought one the other day and she had no issues setting it up - and she's not a hardware kind of person (even though it should be plug and play )

I am not familiar with the airport express, so can't help you on that one.

If the PS3 is connected to a network, he can stream from any PC on the network, it just needs to be enabled to do so between the PC and the PS3.

 

[GlocksRock]

Generally pictures don't take up all that much space, so any decent sized hard drive should do. For streaming pics, videos and music he can use the ps3 media server which is a free app and pretty easy to setup as well.

 

[hjfischer]

I'm a bit late in discussing this but here is my suggestion. I just bought a 500 GB external drive (Iomega) which allowed drag and drop updating or data entry without auto backup. IMHO, this is a useful feature since auto backup can be difficult to disable on some models. Good luck.