Purchase your external hard drive. Most hard drives will do, but some may have incompatibilities. Western Digital is one that works fine.
Once you have your external hard drive purchased, use the USB cord provided to connect it to a COMPUTER (not your Playstation 3).
IMPORTANT* Once your external hard drive is connected to your computer, go to START, CONTROL PANEL, ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS, COMPUTER MANAGEMENT, and select DISK MANAGER on the left hand side options. Select the external drive and read the "File System" type. If it says "NTFS", right click the disk and select "Delete Partition".
The reason you needed to delete the partition is because it MUST be FAT32. However, Windows XP will partition a hard drive into FAT32 but only in 32 GB partitions. Go to start,settings, control panel, administrative tools, computer management, disk management in the new box that opens. Using an open source OS like Linux will allow you to use the built in Gparted to partition the hard drive in most file structure formats with no size limit like on XP. This way will allow you to partition a drive into FAT32. You must instead go to DOWNLOAD.COM and search for "Swiss Knife". Download the program that comes up (CompuApps SwissKnife V3 x.xx) and install it when the download completes. Once the install is complete, run the application and select the external hard drive you need to partition. On the top select the following settings: (Partition Type: Primary), (File System: FAT32), and (Volume Label: [whatever you want]). Then at the bottom, select "Create" and you're done.
Alternatively you can format using the command prompt: format h: /FS:FAT32 (This works if you are running Windows Server 2003.)
If you are on Mac OS X, open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app, pick the drive, and click on the 'Erase' tab. Pick 'MS-DOS (FAT)' for the file system type, and click on the 'Erase' button. This will reformat the drive in FAT-32.
Once you are SURE the partition is FAT32, open "My Computer" and double-click on your empty external hard drive. Now, you will want to create a folder system identical to that on the Playstation 3. Right click to create a new folder and name the first folder "Picture" (not Photo). Do this for "Music", "Video" and "Game". When you are finished, you should have 4 folders total in the hard drive. Each folder should (at this point) be empty.
Now, you can load all the music you want into your music folder, all the video you want into your video folder, and all the photos you want into your picture folder. Your game folder should still be empty.
At the bottom right hand corner of the screen, left click the green arrow in your icons list and select "Safely remove..." Once your computer tells you "XXX drive can now be safely removed", unplug the hard drive from your computer.
Now, you can connect the hard drive to your Playstation 3 and use the extra space to save information and access all your extra content saved on your external hard drive.Congratulations, you now have turned your 40, 60, or 80 gigabyte Playstation 3 into a much larger one for all your multi-media needs. Enjoy!
