Going to buy one this week. Not just for dist but for other games I play. Mainly ff14. What do specs have to be? Main question is what is the best efficient rpm?

ps3 runs on SATA I
current high density HDDs are already able to saturate that.

do yourself a favor and by a good hybrid drive and you get the best of both worlds (high capacity and best speed possible on ps3)

Hybrid drives decay absurdly fast though.

this is a myth

No?

They're basically HDDs caching loads of stuff on a small SSD for quick reading. They're constantly running through the SSD portion. Firmware has improved to reduce that, sure, but they still decay rather quickly.

ps3 runs on SATA I
current high density HDDs are already able to saturate that.

do yourself a favor and by a good hybrid drive and you get the best of both worlds (high capacity and best speed possible on ps3)

Ok just just go into to best buy and ask for a cheap 2.5 ssd and I'm good?

thats is only partially true.

the short life expectancy really only applies to the old first generation. I have been torturing SSDs on 24/7 on a linux server and with Windows as system drive. they barely have any space to perform TRIM and they are working fine for years. the same will be true for the flash memory of hybrids, they will last for years. chances are any drive will anyway die after 5 years, regardless if it is a SSD or not.

beside that, the physical part of hybrid drive almost fully saturates the SATAI port and the flash memory is not just excessively written/read. frequently used files are cached there.

FUN FACT:
The often quoted fact that "SSDs will wear out and be unable to write data after a certain point!" causing everyone to worry about limiting the amount of data they write to their precious SSDs is 100% technically true

However it is taken out of context by everyone, just like that ages old "NASA study" about how the average human needs "8 glasses of water a day"... with no context of how big a "glass" is, or the fact that the urban legend study was factoring in the significant amounts of moisture already present in the food you're supposed to be eating, and suddenly my grade school teacher was trying to force-feed me water "for my health" and then couldn't figure out why everyone in class needed to go to the bathroom all the time I'M ****ING HYDRATED ENOUGH MR SMITH I DON'T NEED A WATER BOTTLE

...uh. Sorry about that.

Anyways, a SSD technically will stop working, but when you stop and think about it, its going to stop working LONG after a traditional hard drive breaks from a mechanical failure, or more to the point, LONG, LONG after you voluntarily replace it with a faster, larger capacity SSD with even more longevity that you bought for a third of the price of your original SSD on sale a few years later

For some fun reading, some guy who was doubtlessly Amarrian deep in his cold, black heart, ran a "SSD endurance program" where he tortured some commercial SSDs with constant, unending, 24/7 data writes for months on end. For science.

Many of them survived over one PETABYTE of writes. For reference, most normal users, yes, even you guy who downloaded a dozen ~20 gigabyte games this month you have no intention of actually playing or finishing, write a few terabytes, one thousandth of a petabyte, a year.

TL:DR don't stress over the lifespan of an SSD you're gonna buy because unless you're using it as the keystone of a million user server, planning on taking it with you into a nuclear apocalypse, or passing it on to your grandchildren, its probably gonna outlast you

Yes that is exactly what to go for.

You will probably end up with like a PNY or kingston 128gb which are both perfect for what you are doing.

Are you familiar with the USB requirements for your different install options?

Must be FAT32 formatted

5gb for PUP install only.

Much larger if you want to do full backup and restore.

No clue man guide me. All I want to do is install the OS for ps3. I'm not trying to transfer anything