So, now that I have a Playstation+ membership and am getting a lot of free games and early-release betas, etc., my 80GB hard drive in my PS3 was filling up. I was down to about 10GB and decided to do an upgrade. Here are two helpful articles that walk you through putting a new hard drive in the PS3...

With pictures and without pictures. It should be noted my 80GB model doesn't have the same drive bay as the one pictured in the CNet article, but the steps to remove it/insert the new drive are very similar.

My upgrade went smoothly, so I'll just run through the steps I took. Your mileage may vary...

1) Purchased a 500GB Seagate 2.5" 9.5mm high 5400RPM SATA drive from Newegg.com The reason I went with the 500GB Seagate rather than, say, the 640GB Western Digital is because on the day I happened to go looking, Newegg was running a combo deal with the Seagate drive + an external enclosure for 2.5" SATA drives. The external enclosure was necessary to back up my system. It's very important that you verify your 2.5" drive is 9 or 9.5mm in height. The very high capacity drives (750MB+) are 12.5mm in height and will not fit in the PS3. Also, for this application, 5400RPM is fine and actually preferred for heat disbursement reasons.

2) You need something to back up your system. Depending on the size of your current hard drive, you will probably need something bigger than a thumb drive. I had an 80GB system with only 10GB free, so I knew I was going to need something substantial. I happened to have some non-functional laptops with functional 120GB SATA drives in them, so I just removed one of those and put it in the enclosure that shipped with my new 500GB drive. If you don't have the luxury of old drives lying around, you can add an external drive to your Newegg order, which does increase the cost a bit. The backup drive has to be formatted with the FAT32 file system. If you buy a new external drive, it probably is already formatted that way. You can check by connecting the drive to your PC and right-clicking the drive icon in Windows Explorer and looking at the Properties.

If your drive is formatted in something else, you'll have to reformat it. Unfortunately, Windows won't format anything larger than 32GB in FAT32. (This is not a limitation of FAT32, which will handle up to 2TB drives, it's a throttle put in Windows deliberately by Microsoft. Thanks, Bill.) I had to reformat my old laptop drive, so I used Parted Magic. Download the disc image, burn it to a CD and then boot your PC with the CD. Connect your external drive, run the Partition Manager program and format your external drive with FAT32. Easy.

3) Connect your backup drive to your PS3 and use the Settings>System Settings>Backup Utility to backup your system. My backup turned out to be 47GB and took about 90 minutes to complete. It saved all my user accounts and online account information, saved games and downloads. The only thing that didn't make it were a few specialty (free) themes. No big loss. It's also possible that game patches and DLC haven't made it back into the system, but those will be easily downloaded again.

TROPHY INFORMATION IS NOT SAVED. If you want to save your trophies, you have to sync them to your online account. This is fine unless, like me, you have kids using your PS3 who don't have online accounts. I went ahead and got my oldest child a sub-account under my account so his trophies could be saved, but there was no way I was going to have online accounts for my two youngest, so their trophies are kaput. This is stupid, Sony. Please change this behavior.

4) Take your backup drive to your PC, download the latest system software update from Sony and copy it to your backup drive according to the instructions. (You have to put it in a PS3\UPDATE folder--all uppercase characters--on your backup drive.)

5) Follow the instructions in the links above to swap your old PS3 hard drive out with the new, much bigger drive you just purchased. This was the easiest part.

6) Connect your backup drive to the PS3, reconnect all the cables and turn it on. Follow the on-screen prompts to format your new drive and re-install the system software from the update on your backup drive. Once you have finished restoring the basic system, you'll have to create one user account. As soon as you have done that, run the Backup Utility again and restore your data. Restoring my 47GB of data took about two hours. (:sheesh:)

7) Start downloading lots of cool stuff without worrying about how much space it's taking up on your hard drive.