In what ways does the PS3 take advantage of its hard drive?

Downloads mostly. Demos, games, videos, music, photos, all this can be stored on your HDD, and with 60 gigs there is more than enough room for you to store all of this media. dahaka_1

[QUOTE="dahaka_1"]Downloads mostly. Demos, games, videos, music, photos, all this can be stored on your HDD, and with 60 gigs there is more than enough room for you to store all of this media. KraigA

From what I heard it can go much higher. using an external HDD enclosure with SATA output, they plugged a 750gb HDD to the PS3. As long as bigger laptop HDD don't use more power than the one now, I don't see any reason they could not go that high when those kind of HDD will be out (laptop one) 

I'm considering getting a PlayStation 3, mostly because of it's BluRay player, but I'd like to know in what way does/can/will the PS3 make use of it's large hard drive space?
ThanksSonicBooom

Basically like a normal computer.  It creates a cache and decreases load times, allows for faster texture swapping/loading, and all what the posters listed above said.

[QUOTE="dahaka_1"]Downloads mostly. Demos, games, videos, music, photos, all this can be stored on your HDD, and with 60 gigs there is more than enough room for you to store all of this media. KraigA

with laptop HDDs, the largest current capacity is 200GB.  but some have had success with external HDDs.  and one company has built an adapter to allow you to attach a regular IDE PC drive to the PS3 and have it act as the system's HDD. 

[QUOTE="KraigA"][QUOTE="dahaka_1"]Downloads mostly. Demos, games, videos, music, photos, all this can be stored on your HDD, and with 60 gigs there is more than enough room for you to store all of this media. eclipsed4utoo

with laptop HDDs, the largest current capacity is 200GB. but some have had success with external HDDs. and one company has built an adapter to allow you to attach a regular IDE PC drive to the PS3 and have it act as the system's HDD.

like people have said...any hard drive enclosure with a sata output can be connected directly the sata input in the hdd bay.  You'll need the enclosure to act as the power source (or some other power source).  The adapter you're talking about is simply an IDE to SATA converter.  I've been wanting to set up my 250gb hard drive for the ps3, but I really have no reason to as of yet. 

Advantages of the Playstation 3 HDD:

1. The greatest advantage is that game developers can rely on the console having a hard drive to cache data and isntall and pre-requisites to speed up overall gameplay and loading times.

2. Downloadable content from the Playstation Network

3. Store your media, you can copy over music, videos, photos to your drive from other storage mediums

4. Upgradability, Sony gives you the ability to upgrade your drive if you wish to. User's manual gives you step by step instructions on how to remove and replace your hard drive. Playstation 3 uses 2.5" SATA Hard Drives (laptop HDD), replacing your drive does not void your warranty.

5. Backup/Restore, Playstation 3 offers a great backup/restore utility to backup and restore all your hard drive data. If you ever wish to replace your hard drive, you won't have to be afraid of losing any data.

6. Saved games, you do not require a memory card to save your games to. All data will be saved to the hard disk. You can create "virtual memory cards" for Playstation and Playstation 2 games, and Sony offers a seperate Memory Card adaptor to transfer your old saved games to your Playstation 3.

7. Ability to partition the drive and to install an "Other OS". Currently YellowDog Linux and Fedora are two of the more "stable" Operating Systems available for Playstation 3.

Well some games also save data to the HDD to make for shorter load times such ad Oblivion and Spiderman 3. Those are the only ones I know of there might be more though.The_Dark_Jester