Testing (continued):

Thermal Testing:

Thermal testing consisted of monitoring the idle and load temperatures of the hard drives' top surface using an external digital thermometer while the drives were just placed in still air with no fans or housings to interfere with passive cooling. The idle condition consisted of the system just sitting at the Windows desktop with no extra applications running for a period of at least one hour. The load condition was created by running SiSoft Sandra's Physical Disks Benchmark in a looping pattern for a period of at least one hour.


The data in the chart above doesn't showing anything too exciting, but it does confirm that the Western Digital Scorpio 250GB 2.5" SATA Hard Drive can operate nice and cool. Running at 5400 RPM helps keep heat production low, and it may contribute to another plus experienced in this phase of testing. Paying close attention to the noise produced by each drive reveals that the Scorpio runs cool and quiet.

Testing with a Sony Playstation 3:

I recently purchased a 60GB Sony Playstation 3, which happens to use a 2.5" SATA hard drive. The Playstation 3 is a great system in the sense that it allows anyone to increase the size of the drive without voiding the warranty. A simple search online for "PS3 hard drive upgrade" will result in many quick tutorials on removing the pre-installed hard drive and installing a larger one.


With the Western Digital Scorpio 250GB 2.5" SATA Hard Drive installed in the Playstation 3, I turned it on and it asked to format the new hard drive. After a reboot the system was ready to go. Being the curious guy I am, I wanted to see how much space was readily available after a fresh format on a 250GB drive. In the system information section I notice 205GB free out of 232GB available. The 232GB was not a shock, it is what is shown on any computer system, as well. But where did I lose an additional 27GB? I know the Playstation 3 does not use that much for its system, so I tried manually formatting with different options to see if that helped.

There are three choices when formatting a PS3 hard drive; use all for PS3, use 10GB for PS3, and use 10GB for Other OS (Linux). I tried all of these options in search of my lost capacity. As I mentioned above, when using all for PS3 I had 205GB free, when using 10GB for PS3 I had about 9GB free, and when using 10GB for Other OS I had 196GB free. It seems that the PS3 system can only use a maximum of 205GB, regardless of the size of the drive connected.

Another thing I was curious about was the file system of a formatted PS3 hard drive. I hoped I could make a backup of the whole hard drive with an imaging program, such as Acronis True Image. I removed the hard drive and plugged it into my computer. Both Windows and Linux based operating systems detected the new drive, but when Windows activated the drive there wasn't any readable partitions. Linux did not have to activate the drive, but in the GNOME Partition Editor there weren't any partitions either.

I could not find any definitive answers online about PS3 limiting partition sizes, but I would take a guess that that reasoning behind the 10GB limit is that when the 20GB model was around, 10GB would have split the drive in half. That would make sense in preventing people from formatting more than what is possible on the 20GB hard drive. At this time, a 250GB hard drive would really be a waste of space and money spent, since the Playstation 3 cannot fully use all available space. I suppose (and hope) a future firmware update would allow larger partitions, and custom partition sizes would be nice, too.