How many games can a 12gb ps3 hold

You simply buy the mounting kit, screw in any 2. After powering up the machine, it auto-recognises the presence of a new drive and the user is asked if he wants to make the switch from flash to hard drive storage.

At this point, the entirety of the flash chip is copied onto the hard drive in a somewhat lengthy procedure. Our drive had four tiny save games on it, but the process still took around 15 minutes to complete our guess is that the 4GB cache portion was also ported across. Once the transfer is finished, the flash store is deactivated completely, only being used once more if the hard drive is completely removed from the system.

Time factor aside, there a couple of minor disappointments and annoyances with the process. Before the Super Slim launched, there were rumblings that you could take your existing PS3 drive and simply dock it into the new hardware, continuing to game on as per normal. Hands on, it is clear that this is not the case - any drive that isn't specifically married to that particular PS3 is going to be wiped before it can be used.

This was probably to be expected bearing in mind that PS3 hard drives are all encrypted with a per-unit key. Secondly, with the flash storage dormant, it does strike us as something of a missed opportunity. It's clear that the chip has its strengths and that in some cases it can out-perform a conventional hard drive. The 4GB Xbox S allows players to retain access to the flash memory and use it simultaneously with the hard drive, and we would have liked the same function with the PS3.

Unfortunately, GameOS is geared towards a single storage point and it's clear that Sony didn't want to undertake the significant development work required to support multiple devices concurrently. As we noted in our GB Super Slim hands-on , this is a more simply designed PlayStation 3 using lower-grade materials than its predecessor. Plastics lack much in the way of a premium finish, while the slot-loading Blu-ray drive has been swapped out for a top-loading arrangement with a sliding lid that rattles somewhat.

Owing to the transition in optical drives, the noise level from the disc is now significantly more pronounced. Form factor is obviously reduced though - an important element for many. We now know that other key cost areas have seen no improvement compared to the outgoing Slim - there's still a 45nm Cell processor and a 40nm RSX.

These components draw the most juice from the mains, so we find that overall power consumption is much the same as it was at around 70W. Expect this to change over time - we know that the Cell is being shrunk down to 22nm while 28nm is a good fit for the RSX. Future PS3 models will doubtless retain the same chassis but be considerably cooler, quieter and more power efficient.

However, crucially, the cut-down in quality of materials on the new model doesn't detract from the fact that this offers the exact same core functionality as the older Slim. All the ports and sockets remain as they were, so in areas where Sony might have been tempted to make cutbacks removing the Toslink audio output for example , we find that the firm has commendably restrained itself.

Happily, the days of Sony removing useful functionality from the PS3 are long gone. Other elements of the new model remain identical too. The Slim introduced a new HDMI controller that added a very mild noise to the output - something we noted a while back when we used it for gaming performance analysis.

It's the same story in the Super Slim too. It's a little disconcerting to find a digital video interface not transmitting its output losslessly, and some members of the more hardcore AV fraternities believe it is visible to the human eye, something we didn't agree with - so we put it to the test.

Our thinking here was that the 2D art and flat colours found in the game should highlight any kind of visual difference, while using the photo viewer ensured that both consoles are outputting a mathematically identical image, reproduced in exactly the same way by the system software.

You can look at the results above yourself. After much eyeballing, we can't tell the difference, and as such we have no hesitation recommending any PlayStation 3 as a brilliant Blu-ray player. This could have been a cost-cutting exercise gone too far, a compromise doled out to a territory that historically Sony has tended to place last in the pecking order when it comes to hardware.

The fact that the 12GB PS3 isn't available in Japan or the USA does suggest that the full weight of the firm's confidence doesn't rest in this entry-level offering, but the truth is that the product is solid, offering an intriguing balance of price and performance. The flash storage reads almost as fast as a conventional hard drive, and while write speeds are very slow, the fact that it has next to no latency moving from one file to the next goes a long way to making up the difference.

One thing we should point out is that all our comparisons were based on entirely empty hard drives - these will lose some performance over time as they become fuller and as fragmentation takes hold.

Thus, the flash could actually become even more competitive over the months and years. But even in these tests, we found that selected games actually load data faster, though deletion speeds on the flash storage are dire.

This appears to extend to the game cache too, and a few titles like Rage may cause some issues on this hardware. The deletion issue could also further intrude on the user experience - deleting installs can take an absolute age and with the limited storage available, you'll need to do this a lot if you're shuttling between various games. Available space is undeniably tight, leading to other complications too.

On the Xbox , once a game or demo is downloaded from Live, it's instantly accessible. Digital Foundry specialises in technical analysis of gaming hardware and software, using state-of-the-art capture systems and bespoke software to show you how well games and hardware run, visualising precisely what they're capable of.

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Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings. Watch on YouTube. RGB values fluctuate to a tiny degree - something we don't see on the original 'fat' PS3s. While it's weird to have a lossless output not operating losslessly, the human eye can't tell the difference. Will you support the Digital Foundry team? Sony has put the PlayStation 3 on a diet, revealing a slimmer model with more memory — and a 12GB flash model.

Sony has put the popular games console on a diet, revealing a slimmer model with more memory — and a flash model with a lot less memory. Heading into , Japan was the last territory where new units were still being produced until May 29, , when Sony confirmed the PlayStation 3 was discontinued in Japan…. PlayStation 3. Not a big deal, as many games do not install to your hard drive. If this is a problem, consider upgrading the hard drive later.

There are several original PlayStation 3 hardware models, which are commonly referred to by the size of their included hard disk drive: 20, 40, 60, 80, or GB. Although referred to by their HDD size, the capabilities of the consoles vary by region and release date.