PS3 Hard Drive Replacement – Will a 3.5″ ATA Hard Drive work

Well, it can slightly reduce loading time. However, reading from the DVD / blu-ray / HDD is not the only time consumming operation that can happen during those loading screen. In fact, it is generally not the longest operation.

After reading the data from the disc, the game still has to:

• decompress it (data is generally compressed to reduce used space)
• rebuild cross-references (between textures and models, ...)
• ...

Those operations generally take more than half of the loading time. There exists some techniques to reduce this time (streaming, ...) but they may not be applicable to all types of game, and they can be difficult to implement.

Game are allowed to use some space on the HDD as a cache of blu-ray / DVD (both on Xbox and PS3). This is not that much used as installation (either via the Guide on Xbox, or via the game on PS3) is generally a better option (as the cache can be cleared automatically by the system after exiting the game).

On some specific games, loading time can be drastically improved however. Gran Turismo 5 for PS3 loading time can be halved by using a SSD.

Yes, you can backup the drive, assuming you can get it to bootup and run without getting the yellow light. Sony's User Guide on backing up states:.

Some types of backed up data can be restored on another PS3™ system. The types of data that can be restored on another system are as follows:

• Saved data from PlayStation®3 format software *1
• Image files under (Photo)
• Music files under (Music) *2
• Video files under (Video) *2
• Bookmarks added under (Internet Browser)
• Terms that were added using (Settings) > (System Settings) > [Add/Edit Term], or predictive terms that were "learned" by the on-screen keyboard

*1 Copy-protected data cannot be restored. Also, saved data that has been restored may not be usable in some games.

*2 Does not include copyright-protected data.

Most everything should backup and restore, except copy-protectd game saves, movies, and music.

Your best bet for getting your data to the new system is to transfer the data directly from the old to the new PS3 using an ethernet cable. Again, details in the PS3 User Guide. Unfortunately, both systems have to be functional for this to work. After the transfer, any old backups will no longer work. From the user guide:

If you back up data on a PS3™ system and then transfer data to another PS3™ system using the data transfer utility, copy-prohibited saved data that is included in the backup data cannot be restored on either system.

Unfortunately, you can't just swap hard drives between systems. According to this thread requesting this feature, it looks like the PS3 encrypts the internal drive with a key that is unique to each physical system. This key can't be transferred.

Good luck!