Can the PS3 read any other filesystem than FAT32 for external drives?

I'm reformatting my biggest USB hard drive today. It seems like filesystem support for gaming systems is kind of in a bad place right now -- it looks like both the PS3 and the 360 both only support FAT or FAT32, but both those systems have a 4GB file size cap.

I'd like to use the drive for media files (to watch on the gaming systems), but also for computer backups, including some Linux OS ISOs that are bigger than 4GB.

Do I have no other options?

Solution 1:

Not to my knowledge.

Best bet for media access is to set up your hard drive on a laptop or other computer and just use a media server to provide the media to your PS3.

A FAT32 partition can go up to 32GB if I'm not mistaken and you can create multiple 32GB partitions on the same hard disk. They will each show up as a separate folder on the PS3 however.

http://www.wikihow.com/Add-an-External-Hard-Drive-to-a-PlayStation-3

Edit: This may since have been changed to allow > 32GB drives but I have no first hand experience to verify it. Either way that still doesn't help with the 4GB file size limitation on a FAT32 partition. You could split the file into multiple < 4GB parts if that is applicable to the file-type in question.