Can i use an external hard drive on a playstation 3?

May be...

can i save games annd stuff like that to it

its a 500gb free agent pro if that helps

You can use an external hard drive.



You can't save games onto it, or rented movies. You might if it's a movie you bought from the ps store, then you technically own it and the XMB might allow a copy option. But it won't let you copy games or rentals. Trailers and other small videos it usually allows.



I think you can put your game saves, and memory cards and all that onto it as well. I haven't bothered to do that. I use a 250gb external for video files. I haven't filled it up yet, basically I'm converting videos to HD and saving them on the external drive. Yes the ps3 can play stuff directly from the hard drive. The only thing that takes a while is for the hard drive to connect and the ps3 to read the directory structure. That takes a couple of minutes.



One other thing, your hard drive must be formatted to fat32. (This means, formatted to utter crap, but that's what Sony decided) There are more than one style of fat32 so if your formatter asks what kind of fat32, say windows 95-style.



If there's already stuff on your free agent, see if you can add a partition on the free space, without destroying what's already there. If you can create a primary partition of 100gb the ps3 will probably see it and say "100gb usb drive detected." It's hard to need more than 100gb for ps3, except for video. And with usb drives, putting 100gb of video on an external drive is a very slow, laborious chore. Yeah, I'm doing it, but it's taking forever.

I have used an external hard drive to save my info when my first ps3 stopped reading discs. I know you can copy everything from the ps3 to an external hdd but I don't know if you have to transfer it back before using it or not. Just plug it into your usb slot and you can copy your gamesaves to it. Hope that helps

u have to format to fat 32

and it can only be used for storage

to access the files u have to copy over to ps3