Best Portable External Hard Drives Reviews

Could Anyone tell me if this kind of Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 3.0/2.0 Ultra Portable External Hard Drive (Black) would work on a ps3?which claims to accept only usb 2.0?i know about the compatibility and that it has to be formatted on fat 32) but could anyone tell me for a fact yes or no and why?

It’s a bit more complicated than that. I bought this drive to use with my ps3 and it didn’t work (I used fat32). After a little researching I found out that people were experiencing the same symptoms: They would plug it in to the ps3, they could feel and hear the disk powering up, but the power light wouldn’t turn on.

Some people fixed this by using a powered usb hub. It looks like the ps3 usb ports do not put out enough power to properly run the device. I don’t know if this is an issue with all ps3 consoles The drive runs flawlessly on my laptop.

As already said the main problem with this drive is the VCD partition, which is a PERMANENT 1st partition.

If your PS3, XBOX, Video player with USB,PVR etc is not able to “read” past the 1st partition there is no way to use it.

It does not matter the format as long as your “machine” will not be able to “read” that (2nd,3nd etc) partition.

If you need to expand your PS3 data storage, it is always advisable to get a simple USB drive (even unbranded enclosure with any brand of bare drive) with several hundred GB(s). As you know already, PS3 requires FAT32 file formatted drive. On top of that partition needs to be created on a logical drive structure.

My Passport Essentials SE is not designed to work in this way. You can format your WD drive to FAT32 using third party formatting utilities. But most of the time you may not able to take the full advantage of MPE-SE large capacity. Since the drive is not designed to work in this way, it may become corrupted and unresponsive over time. And you cannot copy files larger than 4GB (3.99) to FAT32 partitions.

As I said before, it is always good idea to buy a separate smaller drive to use with PS3. My Passport Essentials SE comes with “unnecessary tools” such as Virtual Drive (VCD) Hardware encryption, Hard coded energy saving modes and NTFS file system for your “PS3 application”.I hope this is clear enough you to understand your current situation.