farbot.com

One of the quirks of connecting external media to the PlayStation 3 involves the filesystem of the device. If it's not a FAT or FAT32 volume, the PS3 won't read or write to it. This isn't a huge surprise given the FAT filesystem's age, and the fact that nearly every flash card in the world is formatted with it. It's assumed to be royalty-free, even if recent patent-related court cases by Microsoft have started trying to collect royalties from just about everyone under the sun.

When I bought a new hard drive enclosure to enable my PS3 to read and write a hard drive for backup and file transfer purposes, I figured it would be a snap to format it FAT32 on my Windows XP desktop and then just walk it over and plug it into the PS3. It wasn't that simple.

It wasn't the enclosure, because I'd already used one of these and it's rather nice. It's a Venus-brand with a built-in fan that's pretty easy to install a drive into. Aside from being the same price as one I got a year-plus ago for my birthday it now supported up to 750GB drives. The old one can only do 400GB or 450GB if memory serves.

It wasn't the hard drive itself, because that was in very good working order, having been pulled from an old PC almost two years ago.

It was Windows XP and a marketing-driven technology limitation, something that happens often enough on Windows that it shouldn't irk me anymore but always still does. You see, XP won't let you format a large hard drive as FAT32, for no good reason.

It's easy to understand why if you've tried to use NTFS-formatted drives on other platforms. Basically, you can't, or it's very hard to do so. NTFS formatted drives work on Windows, it's a closed-source format, and Microsoft doesn't share the specs for free (if at all).

An enterprising coder wrote a program that formats hard drives as FAT32 for you under Windows XP anyway, and it's called fat32format. It worked out just fine for me, so give it a shot if you need it.

I got it from CrapControl.com.