| I did this about a month ago and it was quite the nightmare, but I got it working after reading so many different bits of conflicting information. Here are some notes in case it helps anyone else. Forgive the length. I wanted to get the max hard drive size possible with the highest chance of the drive lasting. In this case a 2 TB Samsung 870 EVO SSD (Model MZ-77E2T0B-AM) . Note that this is the max an MBR file system supports. I wish it could be 4 TB to really get every game anyone would ever want, but alias we aren't there yet. I imagine a future ODD replacement could get us there like it does with other consoles. Anyways I could not get this working with the offbrand HDD adapters you can find from Amazon. Maybe it was just broken, but I had to buy the SATA self install kit to modify my official HDD/network adapter. You can still find the official adapter on ebay pretty cheaply. Even brand new ones. I also bought a 3D printed tray from amazon to keep the SSD secure. I used a newer version of ULaunchELF that supports formatting of 2 TB drives to format it. Once formatted I used an HDLBatch command line program someone put together to send games to the drive attached to my PC via a command line prompt. It's pretty simple and goes fast. Other software would not work no matter what random videos on Youtube say. If you want artwork and a decent program for renaming the files I would recommend adding those games to the OpenPS2Launcher software on your PC to get the artwork downloaded so you can transfer that later via USB or FTP. Unfortunately even though the OpenPS2Launcher software does so much it doesn't copy games to an HDD. Really odd that feature isn't there, but these are all volunteers. Also note if you have a lot of art files there is a limit to how many you can copy to the hard drive over USB using ULaunchELF, and it doesn't tell you this. It might even look like the transfer finished, but in reality there will be a bunch of missing files. The workaround is to transfer over FTP and the nightmare there is getting an FTP connection to stay connected. For me it was 100% consistent that the connection would sever after about 20 seconds of transferring. Every time with a variety of different FTP clients, ULaunchELF versions etc. To get it working it required a very specific version of ULaunchELF and configuration in FileZilla which were setting the transfer settings to Active and limit the number of simultaneous connections to 1. |
