Sony offers PS3 hard drive upgrade service in Japan

It's for people who are either really fearful of basic electronic work or people who have great wealth and poor decision making skills.

I applaud Sony if they make money with this. I guess they already have the setup, so even small numbers of takers = money.

It's just so easy to do this yourself. One of the best things about the PS3, and I absolutely bought more content because it was trivial to add hundreds of gbs for more movies and games.

I'd be down for something like this. I don't have the means to transfer alol my game data over and I don't want to go into psn and re dl evertything i own.

250gb that's it? So, 250GB, ship it, then ship it back to you? Or buy a 500GB, buy a flash drive to copy the supported files (some stuff you just can't move unfortunately) and have it done in 30 minutes and quite a bit cheaper too...

I'm no good at this type of thing and I was able to replace my 80GB drive in my PS3 with a 500GB drive by following youtube tutorials and walkthroughs showing how to do it. The 500GB drive was less than $100. If I can do that its practically foolproof to do so and the $184 replacement process for a drive half that size just seems really complicated and unnecessary.

"Is this something you'd like to see offered in America and Europe as well?"

Hell no. If sliding out a hard drive, and sliding in a new one scares you that much, you probably shouldn't own a PS3...or any other electronic.
What's next, is Best Buy going to charge hundreds to plug in your PS3 and set up a PSN account? Oh wait...

I paid $87 to upgrade mine to a 500g. That's how simple it is.

What about purchased movies and TV shows? Is this the only way to transfer them or is there a way to do that on your own? Or re-download?

Seriously, it took me like 30 minutes to back up a few extra things that didn't fit into the 4GB drive I was using for backup and maybe 2-3 minutes to switch the drive out.

Funny thing is I once had someone offer me $50 to switch his hard drive (and it probably wouldn't have even needed extra backups so it would have been $50 for five minutes of work) because when I told him I did it in no time at all he was blown away and thought I was a high grade technical genius. I kept trying to tell the dude it was easy but he had more money than sense and kept trying to get me to do it.

I say if idiots wanna pay for this service, let them waste all that money they are apparently rolling in since they have no intelligence to figure anything else out for themselves. I see FAR more useless services being offered out there in many industries.

The only thing I'd consider using this for would be for those game saves that can't be copied, like Rock Band and Mega Man. It's really inconvenient to have to start from the beginning again, especially for Rock Band 2, where you need to play through hundreds of songs to unlock all the trophies. That's a lot of hours I don't really want to waste again trying to get a few trophies.

You know what pisses me the hell off, this should be done automatically anytime we get our PS3 repaired. When I sent mine back a year ago with a YLOD, their rule was that they wipe your HD.

I got my 320GB drive for $39 from Newegg a while back. I backed up all my data and except for some videos they all came back on the new drive.

I also picked up an enclosure for the old HD and now I have a nice USB powered external as well.

So no, this service does nothing for me. Although I can understand why some people might find value in it.

The HDD links to the PS3 system, so if you try to upgrade, then put your old drive back in it won't work anymore. You really need to backup every now and then, it isn't as simple to just swap HDD as I'd always heard. My phat system broke down, so I just bought a slim and figured I'd stick the old HDD in, and it didn't work out. It's easy to upgrade your own HDD, but you need to back up and transfer to the new one to keep out of trouble.

However, it seems like music game info doesn't back up, I lost my band on Rock Band 2, even after transferring my backup to the new system.

This seems pretty dumb. I haven't replaced a PS3's hard drive myself, but I have done so plenty of times with my computer. It is really easy to change hard drives. People just need to get over it. It's not like they have to solder components or something trickier. I guess Sony is happy about this new source of revenue though.