Is it possible to access your PS3's hard drive over the network?

Question

To bypass the lame external hard drive limitations for the PS3, is there any way one could access the PS3's hard drive over the LAN?

Having a media server running on a PC works great in general for streaming media on the PS3 so I am not really looking to solve any problem but am curious.

Perhaps using a protocol like FTP or a SAMBA equivalent.

Alternative but related question: Is it possible to manually place files onto the hard drive? What I mean is that assuming I remove the hard drive and plug it into my PC, would I be able to transfer pictures or music directly onto it?

Answer 1

I don't know of any way of making the PS3 act like a server. It certainly doesn't support access via FTP, SAMBA or anything similar.

You also cannot access data on the PS3's hard drive by plugging it into a PC. The hard drives are encrypted and the data format is not supported on PC.

Not only can you not put the hard disk in a PC, you can't even put it into a different PS3 to access the data. A PS3's hard drive is locked to that PS3's motherboard. If you transplant it to another PS3, the other PS3 will need to reformat the disk before it can be used.