The hard disk drive is found on an external removable bay on the left panel of the console (or bottom panel, if you use the Playstation 3 like shown in Figure 2).

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Figure 5: Accessing the hard disk drive compartment.

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Figure 6: Removing the hard disk drive.

Playstation 3 uses a 2.5” SATA-300 hard disk drive and the unit we disassembled came with an 80 GB unit from Fujitsu, model MHZ2080BH, which rotates at 5,400 rpm (2.5” units are targeted to laptop computers and usually run at 5,400 rpm instead of 7,200 rpm like desktop hard disk drives) and has an 8 MB buffer. Full specifications can be found here.

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Figure 7: The 80 GB 2.5” SATA-300 hard disk drive.