360/PS3 Comparisons

[Waffuru]

I understand that you can use any 2.5 inch SATA HDD for your PS3 (even swapping the 5400 RPM drive for a personal 7200 RPM drive to decrease load times) whereas you have to buy special made drives for the 360.

Yes. The PS3 will take any 2.5 SATA HDD and the 360 only takes the Microsoft made 360 hard drives.

In theory, is it possible to basically sit on a couple of spare HDDs to swap in and out of your PS3 for more space if for some reason you need more? Are you able to drop this into your computer and copy certain files like movies or games onto it (or backup save files and other content from the PS3 to your computer) and then drop it back in without complication?

Yes, although I am not sure you'd really want to mess with switching out the hard drives all the time. It's not hard, but it does take a few minutes to unscrew the housing for the drive and put the new drive in and screw it back on. You can copy whatever files onto your drive and have it work without complication, I've done it before. There are no games that you can copy over to the drive but music, photos and movies all work without issue. If you have a USB external drive then the PS3 has a backup utility that works great for backing up saves.

And what I'm most curious about, what would happen if you attempted to use a Solid State Drive? Would it work, and if so, would it drastically increase performance for load times?

It does work, and decreases load times by 25-50%. However, write times (when installing games especially) are not affected because the Blu-ray drive's read speed caps out at 9mb/s (which is also why they like to force install, because 9mb/s is slow as hell). It isn't worth the cost in my opinion, you're better off with more storage and a 7200 RPM drive. With the SSD you're going from like 15 seconds load time to 10 so it would be better served in your PC or just buying a huge SATA drive.

I've recently been tossing around the idea of getting one of these (I can't afford both) and have been deciding between them (this is if I somehow manage to get the money - and then get it through my wife). There's a lot of different points I don't mind discussing about that if people were interested, but first I'm hoping to address these questions since they aren't well covered in the research I've done so far.

gl with the wife, I own all consoles and am willing to give you my take on all of them whenever