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My PS3 has a 160GB hard drive. I've had it for about a year, and played a lot of games. When I checked it's storage, it says 77GB free out of 149GB. I was aware that I had downloaded and installed a lot of games, and had lots of saves, so I went and cleared all the saves of the games I don't really play, and deleted my previous Skyrim saves, leaving the future save. I know Skyrim saves take up to 4000 megabytes, so once I cleared all of this crap out of my system, I thought I would check the storage. 94GB remaining.

My question is: what could be taking up the rest of the memory? I had some saves left on my system like MW3, Black Ops, Skyrim, Mafia 2, AC3. I deleted all my other AC:R, AC:BH, AC1 saves, but I thought they wouldn't take up another 40GB! What's using up all this space?

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  • 160 GB is a lot for memory. Are you sure you do not mean storage/HDD rather than memory/RAM ?
    – Hennes
    Commented Jun 13, 2013 at 15:39
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    I'm fairly certain he means that since he is talking about downloading games and the space required for each. Would be interesting to see a game require 14gb of RAM :P
    – leety
    Commented Jun 13, 2013 at 15:41
  • It's a common misconception to confuse memory with hard drive space. Non-techies really don't know the difference.
    – Frank
    Commented Jun 13, 2013 at 15:51
  • It's all storage of one sort or another at the end of the day so it's easy to see the source of the confusion.
    – Alex
    Commented Jun 13, 2013 at 16:45
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    You still have more than 50% free, why are you deleting your save data?
    – Brian
    Commented Jun 13, 2013 at 20:46

1 Answer 1

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The PS3 storage is taken up mostly by downloaded games and locally stored game data, usually DLC and installations.

To check if you have space taken up by game data, go to the Game category on the XMB and scroll to Game Data Utility, inside it you'll find space taken up by games, when you're finished with a game, it's safe to delete its Game Data (this wont affect its save), these can take up to a few GBs for a single game, so deleting game data usually frees up a lot of space.

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  • Installing game data would be the primary cause.
    – Cole Busby
    Commented Jun 13, 2013 at 16:04
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    It's surprising to see the number of people who think game saves take up a significant chunk of space. 99% of ps3 games that are currently out won't write more that a few dozen mb. That's insignificant. even if you had 50 games, we're talking about a 160gb HDD.
    – Broots Waymb
    Commented Aug 4, 2015 at 20:29

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