Add USB Ports to your PS3, Anything

In case you somehow used up your four front ports on your PS3, you could always add more ports in the back. Although this video demonstrates how to install more USB’s on a PS3, the techniques shown can be applied to basically any standard USB device.

My PS3 now boasts six (6) fully functional USB ports, the original four in front, and two (2) in the rear. Since their are no schematics or plans anywhere on the net to do this, we hada-lot of head scratching and hurdles to deal with, but in the end it worked out very well as you can see. Basically what we’ve done is disassemble the PS3, cut the data path from the internal USB controller chip on the PS3 to the #4 USB port (the one closest to the center). We then wired the upstream connection on the “external” hub to the PS3′s data output on those traces, thus tricking the PS3 into thinking there’s a regular four port hub plugged into the front.

After that, we wired a downstream cable from the “external” hub back to the PS3‘s front USB port. To activate the two rear USB ports we simply ran 2 pairs of data lines from the “external” hub. All power to and from the external” hub was handled with and old IDE HDD ribbon cable trimmed down to three wires: power, negative, and ground.

The results:

It works with no limitations
Anything can be plugged into the front and rear USB ports. This includes charging your Sixaxis controller, more hubs, Playstation Eye, external HDD, etc.
This setup is a true USB hub and I absolutely love it!

I am fully aware I could just plug in a hub, or get a USB extension cable and run it to the back…don’t post these kinds of obvious solutions. If you ask me why I did it, my answer is…”why not”

Seriously Sony, was this so hard?