I called multiple people and watched multiple videos online. I was told by PS3/Sony Support that switching my old 5400 RPM drive from my Fat PS3 would not affect the game speed/fps at all. Before I go out and buy an SSD, can anyone verify that this does actually work?

Fran?ais

Since when did Sony Support [or any customer service support for that matter] know what they are talking about? A lot of them don't trust me.

I am also apt to believe the hard drive is most likely to play a key role on the FPS issue since its accessed constantly.

Very interesting. I am not experiencing lag at 50 hours but thought this looked cool so I tried it. I was surprised to see I had a corrupt filesystem ... I wonder if Skyrim is causing that? My PS3 is 2 years old so it is impossible to say. Anyway this is a very easy and quick thing to do, 10 minutes total, anyone with lag should give it a shot. I used the first Google link for "rebuild ps3 database" with the quotes.

You're right. I was iffy after having spoken with the representative. I can confirm that she did not seem to know a single thing about what she was telling me.

I think I'll pick an SSD up tomorrow. What do you guys have to say about this OCZ SSD :

OCZ (AGT3-25SAT3-60G) Agility 3 2.5"

• 60GB SATA 3
  
• Read: 525MB/s
  
• Write: 475MB/s

What do you think?

Is that an Intel brand? I believe Funkfactory made mention of it in this thread so be sure to search. But for all its worth I think you made the right choice but check first.

Please give us details if you go through with the purchase if it helped your situation.

Here's the http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-agility-3-sata-iii-2-5-ssd.html to the SSD in question. I'm going with the 60GB variant.

Well there you go! I told you to search this topic and you didn't so I did the work for you lol.

Yes. The link you showed me is the right choice according to Pechenie. Buy buy buy.

Bu-.. bu-.. but I did! I just wasn't sure if it as an Intel SSD.

It is the same SSD as mine. Funkfactory also bought Agility3 but I dunno if he took 60Gb or higher.
Suits perfectly well for me.

Let me give a little explanation of what happening and what causing such freezing and stuttering. There is no doubt the game has memory leaks, so the amount of virtual memory its using overgrows available RAM after playing the game for some amount of time. Plus the game world is really HUGE so it is constantly loads every little peace of it to memory to render it. If we put all this together we may see that it is causing very heavy memory swapping, hence heavy HDD usage. Since common HDDs has a noticable response delay with very poor random reading speed (remember that game is not a movie, it cannot be read from HDD sequentaly byte by byte,track by track and sector by sector; consider game resources are distributed within given 4,5gbs randomly) we see "laggin", freezing and stuttering, because game tries to handle it all.
When we put the SSD inside the PS3 we help the system a lot, since SSD has very tiny response delay and huge random reading speed.

I think this may help you to make the right decision. Putting SSD doesn't help with framerate drops related with heavy graphical system usage such as heavy battles, tons of magical effect, etc., but it causes no freezing at all, you might see just that it become barely not so smooth, and as result it is absolutely not a problem compared to what it was before.

Keep in mind, based on my research, PS3 only supports SATA read and write speeds up to 150mb/s. So anything beyond that is useless and a waste of money.

What is the read and write speed of the default HDD?

Excellent explanation of things! I've got a few stores nearby that have the 60GB models in stock. I'm looking through my PS3 to make sure that 60GBs will suffice.

You are right, but remember that default HDD not even close to these speeds. My SATA III HDD on my PC shows only 100mb/s in seqental (not random!!) reading tests. I think ps3's default is about 30-40mb/s. As i said before, random reading speed is more important in our case which is dramaticaly lower that those. Also, don't forget that response delay on standard HDDs is about 10ms, while on SSDs it's about 0,1ms.

Perfect! That's an excellent investment, I find.

For sure.

At least you always can put it into your PC/Mac and get a superfast computer. It is totally worth it and it is what I am planning to do after I complete with Skyrim.

I don't understand your argument, and you sound foolish. It's obviously a software and hardware issue as the game is only doing this on PS3. And this is the only game giving people this problem on their PS3s. If people can play other games wihout a problem it means there is certainly something wrong with the software, and that MIGHT be related to individual PS3 hardware, but it's tough to say.

I can verify it worked for me 100%. I was about 65 hours in with a 10MB save file when I put in my SSD. My lag had been getting progressively worse, and by the time I made the switch the game was unplayable. I was lucky to get an hour of manageable (but still sub-par) gameplay in a dungeon, and maybe 20 minutes outside/in town when I first started up my game, and EVEN then the performance was much worse than it has been with my SSD. I played the game for 8 hours straight yesterday with only about 2 or 3 very minor fps drops during huge fights, and the drops lasted about 2 seconds. The game has been running as well or maybe even better than when I first started my character on 11/11. Also load times are MUCH faster when going in to shops in towns etc, and noticeably faster when fast traveling.

Also, this will improve the overall performance of your PS3. It wont effect gameplay in most games (as they play fine on normal HDD), but it will improve load times etc, and it will help certain games quite a bit. Also, as others have mentioned, you can always pop it into your PC when you're done with Skyrim and have an ultra fast OS and apps.

I replied to this question (basically) earlier in the thread. There is no need to get a fancy SSD for your PS3 as you will see none of the performance benefits as PS3 is only SATA2 compatible. Read my earlier post.

I'm aware. However I'm sure future generation consoles will be SATA3 compatible. I don't play memory intensive games other than Bethesda's RPGs. I'm going down to the shop to pick it up. Will update with results.

Good luck, we're waiting for your experience.

Alright, slight update. The store I went to did not have the OCZ Agility 3 SSD I was looking for. They instead recomended the Corsair Force 3. The specs are close to identical the only difference being that the Corsair's Read/Write times are 550MB/s and 490MB/s as opposed to 525MB/s and 475MB/s for the OCZ Agility 3. The only other difference is that the OCZ has 60GB spread over 4 sections as opposed to the one 60GB section for the Corsair.

I'll update with my results.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EoXcw5FhjM

This is a video of a PS3 user with an SSD drive. The game does appear to be far snappier when going into menus and loading. (He also notes that he doesn't getting any lag, after 4 hours of play)

UPDATE

I haven't been playing for too long but I can already tell that loading areas, wether it be from a door or fast travel, is at the very least 50% quicker. My ~7MB save file isn't at all skipping frames (not noticeably anyways). Also, my experience with going through any of the menus has increased tremendously. No more 2-4 second delays between searching through quest log and showing locations on the map. It's instant.

What about Whiterun? It took my 14 seconds to load into Whiterun (from Dawnstar Sanctuary for those who want to know) and once I was in things were smooth, very smooth. I'm not quite sure how to display FPS on the PS3 but I can confirm that things are a lot better than they were with the default HDD.

Again, I've only been playing for a half hour, but I can tell that having an SSD helps lowering times of loading from areas to areas.

I'll update again when I hit ~4 hours play time.

-

SSD Purchased:
Corsair Force 3 SATA3
60GB
Read: 550MB/s
Write: 490MB/s
Price: $124.29 CDN

That's my vid, posted in the first post of this thread .

Glad to see that people are finding it in other ways than just reading my OP though .