PS2 hard drive

All that I really know is that the hard drive came out as an add-on accessory for the PS2 when Final Fantasy XI arrived...

What are the advantages to actually having one in a PS2??

Nothing really. It's mostly only good for FFXI. There's other things you can do with it, but most of them are illegal as far as I know.

My old room mate got one in his PS2 right before we parted ways. He claimed that load times on games were faster with the hard drive... Though he might have been just dropping the games onto the hard drive. As far as I know, that wouldn't be illegal as long as you actually owned the game and had a hard copy of said game.

Is that a standard use for the hard drive or is it considered a hack?

Grindspine said:

My old room mate got one in his PS2 right before we parted ways. He claimed that load times on games were faster with the hard drive... Though he might have been just dropping the games onto the hard drive. As far as I know, that wouldn't be illegal as long as you actually owned the game and had a hard copy of said game.

Is that a standard use for the hard drive or is it considered a hack?

Click to expand...

I believe it is a hack. It does make games on the HD load faster, but on the downside, games that aren't loaded actually load slower.

I had the phat PS2 and then we got the HD for it, and I noticed that even a simple game like Katamari Damacy took forever to load, so Joyling bought me a slim PS2 since she needed the phat PS2 for FFXI.

Also our disk tray is wearing out on the old brick .... I only need to open it up when expansions come out, so that's worked out to a little less than once a year. I wish I knew how to hack it to change the DATs for XI out for custom DATs my friend made. *sad*

I do have a bunch of saves backed up on the HDD though, I think I was hard up for cash and pulled everything from one of my memory cards that I didn't want to part with, and threw them onto the hard drive before trading the card in. As far as I know you can't actually LOAD the saves for the game from the HDD though, you actually have to swap it over to a memory card in order to use it.

So overall, hard drive = pointless without FFXI?

it just makes your ps2 heavier and boot slower

:lol It boots XI just fine!

There was going to be so much cool stuff to do with it, but only making it available with an MMO (not even a really huge MMO at that) and not seperately, plus not supporting it once it was out with other games, they really left us hanging on it. I have tons of free space on mine that I will never be able to put to use.

I think the HD (the official one) only worked with FFXI and RE:Outbreak.

Grindspine said:

My old room mate got one in his PS2 right before we parted ways. He claimed that load times on games were faster with the hard drive... Though he might have been just dropping the games onto the hard drive. As far as I know, that wouldn't be illegal as long as you actually owned the game and had a hard copy of said game.

Is that a standard use for the hard drive or is it considered a hack?

Click to expand...

Your right, its not illegal if you actually own the game, its more like your just playing the backup so you won't mess up the actual game disc itself. I do this all the time.. especially with PS2 CD-ROM games (not the DVD ones). I have also downloaded a couple and added them to my HD (aftermarket) and they load hella fast. Its like your playin' on a cartridge. The downfall on that is that some games dont work online with it (if you doing the illegal way) but there is a hack for you to get to play online but thats all a hassle.

I been using the HD method for a long time.. I rarely even use my actual PS2 game disc to play games.

Hinesmdc said:

it just makes your ps2 heavier and boot slower

Click to expand...

No offense though but who cares if your PS2 is heavier? It aint like you carryin' it around to school, to the park, etc. Boot slow? Naw.. I have the HD in my PS2 24/7 and it boots fine for me. It might be cause you got like the first version of the PS2?

I have mines setup so I use a PSX game to boot up my games off my HD.. so yeah.. Im doing some illegal stuff but I dont care.. Im broke at the moment and PS3 would just break me even more.