Run PlayStation 3 games directly from an external hard drive – NTFS / exFAT / ext2/3/4

If you’ve been following my channel you’ll know that I’ve been playing around with my PlayStation 3 recently, hacking it to install some custom firmware and loading loads of games onto its internal hard drive. This is one of the great features of having one of these retro consoles so that you can play any game you want from your legally obtained backup files.

But constantly adding games to your internal hard drive is quickly going to fill it up, especially if you’re using one of the original hard disks with only a couple of hundred GB to use.

One option, and one I highly recommend, is upgrading your internal drive with a second-hand laptop drive. I made a video on how to do this a while ago so please do have a look at that if you want to try it out. I swapped my console over to a 1TB drive for only about £25 or $30.

But another very easy way to increase the game storage on your PS3 is to use an external drive. Unfortunately the issue with external drives is that the PlayStation 3 can only read FAT32 formatted drives. This imposes a maximum individual file size limit of 4GB on the system. If you’re ever copied over a PS3 game in ISO or PKG format you’ll know that most games just don’t fit inside that.

NTFS, exFAT and ext4 are drive formats that support much, much larger file sizes. So we need a way of allowing our PS3 console to read these disks.

Luckily there are homebrew apps that allow us to do just that. So let’s find out how to run games from a modern format hard drive.

Installing the Homebrew Apps

Naturally before you start you’ll need a modded PlayStation 3. If you haven’t yet hacked your system then make sure you check out either my PS3HEN installation video or my Evilnat custom firmware tutorial to get yourself up and running.

If you’ve watched my video on how to load any game onto your PS3 you’ll already have the apps you need installed. If not then please do have a look at that video. The homebrew app section starts at around 3min 30sec. To summarise that you’ll need to create an FAT32 formatted drive and download the .pkg installation files to the root of it. You’ll need the multiMAN MOD app, webMAN MOD and prepISO. Once downloaded use the package installer on your console to install all three apps.

MultiMAN and webMAN are both application installer programs so you’ll need to run both to get the full applications installed.

Just run multiMAN as normal. It will go through its installation and drop you into its own XMB. Exti out of that with your PlayStation button and you should see the multiMAN icon has been replaced by a CCMM icon. That’s multiMAN ready to go.

For webMAN you need to hold down the L1 button as you run it. As the message says this will install the full version of the app which is what we need. Once it’s installed you’ll have a new webMAN Games icon. That’s the actual app. You can simply delete the webMAN Installer app now.

These apps will allow us to run ISO game files directly from an NTFS, exFAT or ext2/3/4 drive.

Setting Up Your External Drive

Once we’ve got the homebrew apps installed we now need a drive to hold our games. I’m going to use an NTFS formatted drive as that works best with Windows. If you’re using a Linux or Apple PC then one of the other formats might be better, but whatever format you have to use the process is identical.

To create an NTFS drive you simply need to attach it to your PC and format it. The standard Windows format tool will work fine, but if you’ve been using the drive for other projects you might need to make sure you’ve cleaned off any partitions first.

I did make another video on how to clean and format a retro gaming drive using FAT32. So please do have a look at that if you’re stuck. You simply need to select NTFS as the drive format instead of FAT32. But I’ll just run you through the basic process now.

Your drive must be accessible using a USB port. If you plug it into your PC it should show up in your file explorer. From here there are a range of applications you can use, but my preference is the Minitool Partition Wizard Free version.

Using that I can right click my drive and delete all the current partitions. I need to make sure the drive is set as an MBR drive otherwise the PS3 won’t be able to read it. If you don’t know what that means then check out my MBR/GPT drive video.

Next I need to right click the unallocated area and create a new partition. I’ll set its format to NTFS, make sure it’s filling the whole drive and then give it a volume name. Once I OK that the job will be added to the list, so all I need to do is check I’m going to format the correct drive and then click apply.

My drive will now be cleaned and formatted.

What Type of Drive to Use

For the drive itself you can really use any USB drive you want. It does of course need to be fairly large so sometimes USB sticks aren’t the best or cheapest route. I prefer to use hard drives.

If you’re like me you’ll probably have some old hard drives from older computers lying around. 3.5 in or 2.5 in laptop drives are great as are SSD drives. Or you can just buy one very cheaply. As I mentioned earlier a 1TB laptop drive comes in at around £25 or $30 which is the best value in terms of cost per GB you’ll get.

Most hard drive units will use a SATA connection so you’ll need a special docking station to allow you to use it over USB. I use this one which allows you to slot any size disk into the enclosure. It costs around £25 but you can also get cut down adapters like this one for around £12. I’ll put links to these in the description below, but make sure that you get one with a power supply connection like these ones. If you’re using a smaller 2.5 in drive or SSD you probably won’t need the power supply, but if like me you’re using a larger 3.5in hard drive it won’t work without the 12V power.

To get it to work just plug the drive onto the SATA connector, attach the 12V power supply and then connect the USB lead to your PC. Use a USB3 connection if you have one, usually marked with an SS-> icon. This will give you the best file transfer speeds.

With that set up we’re ready to start installing games.

Installing You Games to the Hard Drive

This process needs your games to be in ISO format. If you’ve got games as .pkg / .rap downloads you’ll need to use my game installation video instructions to get those installed onto your internal drive.

If you’ve got JB Folder formatted downloads where the game files are just stored in a folder then you’ll need to turn those into ISO files and I’ll show you how to do that at the end of the video.

For now let’s assume you’ve got your games as ISO disk image files.

First we need to make sure we’ve got decryption keys for the ISO files. Most PS3 game disk dumps are encrypted and require a special digital key to unlock them. Usually your console will do all the unlocking for you but you do need to give it the key.

Quite often an ISO download will come with its matching key. If not you can try one of the standard Redump keys from this website. Make sure that the key you use exactly matches the version of the game you’re using. If in doubt try downloading an ISO file from a Redump file store. Just so you know, Redump is one of the game software archiving organisations that keep track of the game dumps.

Once you’ve got your ISO files and keys we simply need to copy them over to the NTFS drive, but they must go into a PS3ISO folder on the root of the drive.

So open up your transfer disk. Make a folder in the root called PS3ISO, all capitals, and then just copy all your ISO and dkey files into it.

Once those have copied the disk is ready to play.

Launching Games From NTFS

Remove your drive from your PC and attach it to your PlayStation. Boot up the console and go to the game menu on the XMB.

Both webMAN MOD and multiMAN MOD allow you to mount games directly from ISO files on your NTFS external drive. Let’s try webMAN first.

At the moment our transfer drive isn’t showing on the XMB. Again that’s because the PlayStation can’t see it. We now need to prepare the NTFS drive for use. This is where prepISO comes in. You should see the app in your game menu. Just select it. It will now go off and scan for ISO games on your external drives and log the titles it finds.

Once it’s finished we can now go to the webMAN Games section, PlayStation 3 Games and you should see some games appearing. Hopefully they will have game icons but I found that sometimes it takes a few goes to get them to show. But you should see all your NFTS drive games listed. Look for the text telling you where a game is stored to work out which is which.

Selecting any game will mount it as normal and drop you back into the original XMB. Once there you should see the title appearing as a normal disk so you can just select it to play the game. webMAN will automatically use the decryption key to unlock the ISO file and them play it directly from the external drive without the need to copy the file over to your internal drive.

Similarly we can launch the games from multiMAN.

Back on the standard XMB launch multiMAN. Once you’re in the multiMAN XMB go to the far left menu option and then select the Scan NTFS drives option. Once that’s completed you can go back to the Games section and again you’ll find your NTFS drive games listed, ready for mounting in the same way as with webMAN.

For both multiMAN and webMAN the scanning process is really there to refresh the games list when you reboot or something changes. If you add games, delete games or if some aren’t working just rescan to get the PlayStation to update its records.

Handling Other Backup Formats

ISO files are only one format you’ll find for game backups.

As I mentioned earlier games in package format have to be copied over to the internal hard drive and installed from there. Again check out my all games video for full details of how to do that and how to get the games licenced without using a PSN account.

For JB Folder formatted games we can repackage them into ISO files so we can use this external drive method.

JB folders are simply folders with all the game files saved inside them, but as simple files and folders rather than a packaged file such as the ISO. So we need to use an app to take those files and turn them into a iso file we can load into the PS3.

PS3 ISO Tools is the app we’ll use. If you head over to the PSX Place website at

https://www.psx-place.com/resources/ps3-iso-tools.68/

You’ll find the download link. Download the archive file to a folder on your PC and then extract it. Inside that you’ll find the executable file so simply double click that to run the program.

First we need to make sure the app is set for the latest firmware version it supports. This will probably be 4.72, but that’s fine for what we need.

Next we need to select the Create ISO option.

You’ll now be prompted to select the game JB folder. So find that on your hard drive and select it.

You’ll now need to tell the program where you want to save the ISO file, so simply select a folder.

Once that’s set the program will take your JB folder files and create an ISO.

You can then simply use that iso file on your external hard drive. Because we’ve created it with ISO Tools we don’t need an decryption key.

Conclusion

So that’s how you can use an external drive for extra games storage. It’s a great way of instantly increasing your storage space and of course you can use multiple drives as simply swap them over as needed.