The Curious Case of the PS3 HDD

[Daltone]

A long while ago a put a large replacement HDD in my PS3 so I could play with Ubuntu. No problems there. I've not used Ubuntu for some time, so I decide to reformat the disc, giving me the whole thing for PS3 storage.

That all goes ok.

So then I start playing some games and notice a significant drop in performace when a game is trying to load something off the hard disc, or save. It's the same RPM as the original HDD that was in there and I had no problems of this nature when there was a partition in place.

Out of curiousity I re-partition the disc and lo and behold everything is back to normal.

What on earth should I do? I've tried the PS3 reformat a few times and the same thing keeps happening. Is it just a Hard Disc that is going duff?

[Robocop2]

How large of a drive are we talking about?

[Daltone]

320GB - off the top of my head.

[awbacon]

Just because the speed of the drive is the same, the buffer or access speed might be slower. Spin rate isn't the complete end all-be all of speed

Id check the specs against the original drive

[Daltone]

Shall do! I have to say that Hard Discs are not really my area.

[Robocop2]

I'm no HDD expert but it sounds to me like an issue with either of those two things combined with the size of the drive since the larger the drive the more time it takes to find the data. If having a partition makes the problem go away that would be my guess.