Question about PS3 Hard Drive Upgrade?

Question

I've watched quite a few instructional videos about upgrading the hard drive for the PS3 and all of them show that the process involves first backing up the data on the old hard drive to an external hard drive and then restoring it to the newly installed hard drive from the external hard drive.

My question is this:
Is it possible to leave the external hard drive out of the process and just put the old hard drive into an external enclosure and restore the data from it to the new hard drive in the PS3 system?

Answer 1

you can simply use a usb flash drive to preserve game saves. Everything else you can redownload or get off your computer again (such as photos or music which you should hopefully have kept backups on a computer)

Answer 2

You will need some sort of external drive (such as a simple USB drive) to back up you game saves only. This will take at most about 5MB's per game. You can re-download your other media content (such as videos purchased games and other demos downloaded from the PS Store) again through the PS Store. If not, then you can purchase an HDD enclosure so that you can use your old HDD as a USB drive and take your data from there.

Answer 3

no, cause you will have no way of getting the old hard drive to work with your PS3.