I don't know what I'm doing, but I want to do the "backup my games to a hard drive and run games off it" thing to this PS3. If I need a different model for that, how expensive are older PS3 models that can do this?
CECH-2500 is the last model that can have a permanent mod, although you have to be careful as some of them can't be.
Look for one that has "yes" in the "hackable" column.
https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Datecode
Those with a "no" now have the opportunity to run "han", which has improved since the early releases but I'm not sure it's quite as good as running "cfw".
As for how expensive, it will depend on what models are available in your local area. I haven't noticed a massive difference in price here, ps3 aren't exactly in demand.
If you want to play all PS2 games then you would need one of the early FAT PS3 models with at least the GS chip and maybe even the EE chip, but you can only play PS2 games from internal hard drive and it's going to be very loud and I'd personally be scared to use it in case it gets yellow light of death (there was a manufacturing problem with Nvidia at the time and it's basically guaranteed to die eventually).
Last edited by smf,