PlayStation 2 Memory Card suggestions needed
 

i'm looking to get some more memory cards for my ps2. i'd like to get some bigger ones, rather than having a bunch of 8mb sony's lying around, but are 3rd party memory cards as reliable as sony?

i was specifically looking at something like this. can anyone shed some light?

thanks in advance..

Everything I've ever read indicates to only use Sony memory cards for the PS 1 and 2.

go with the original.. some of the other ones you need to load a cd prior to using and it can be a pain in the a$$.. if you don't have a mem card yet at least get a 8 mb sony and see how it serves you.. it may surprise you

I would have to agree with the above posters. From reading the ebay listing it talks about turning on the PS2 without a disc in it first. I'm not quite sure if that means booting the PS2 and then putting in a disc, but for me, I'd rather not have the hassle.

Its probably a general rule for all consoles, only buy the nintendo and sony brand mc's.

A side not, if you plan on playing ffxi, then the hard drive can store game saves.

Just a note on the HDD: you can move game saves from your memory card to your Hard Drive, but you can't load the saves from there unless the game specifically has that option enabled. In order to load those saves, you need to drag it back to the memory card.

I made the mistake of buying a 3rd party memory card with multiple "pages" for my PS1. It used some kind of compression to jam all the saves in there. The result was that I lost all of my saves on there, including some rpg saves with hundreds of hours invested.

Go with first party memory cards... because most games are designed with the limitations of these cards in mind, you won't find games that take up that much space (the exception is sports games franchises, which was a major problem on the Gamecube). Get a sony hard drive if you want to archive old saves without losing them. If you don't want to spend the hundred bucks, go get a sharkport or an xport device, which basically lets you archive old saves to your computer hard drive via USB.

As others have said, get the Sony one. Third party cards are notorious for losing saves.

Sure they're a little cheaper, but is it worth saving a few $$$ to risk losing hours and hours of gameplay and having to start over on every game you had saved on there?

Absolutely. You can occasionally find deals on the Sony brand cards; Circuit City had then for 14 bucks a while back, i think.
The five bucks you save will be forgotten when you're having to replay games that you're 30 hours into where the save was corrupt.
I assume something similar exists for PS2, but I really liked the DexDrive on the PS1. I got a lot of use out of it.
I think PSM magazine just reviewed a USB stick-drive for PS2. Not sure what they said about it, however.

It was the Datel Max Drive ($30 MSRP). They gave it a 7 out of 10. It's a 16MB USB key (there's also a 32MB & 64MB version). They said it's very useful for transfering saved games to and from the PC. But you might need to buy other Datel products to use all the features.

http://snipurl.com/7w1j

If you just want to transfer saves to a PC, get a Sharkport or an Xport. It's a little USB device that you connect between your ps2 and your computer (hopefully your laptop, unless you have a long USB cord) and you can drag and drop files to and from each. One warning though: the disc that you need to load to your PS2 in order to do the file swap is a blue disc, which is notorious for causing disc read errors.

thanks for the tips, guys.. looks like i'll get 1-2 more sony cards, and i'll take a look at the sharkport/xport...

I'm just getting into the PS2 system and saw that BestBuy was having a sale on the PS2 8 Meg cards this week. (19.99 but will be $14.99 after using the Gamer's GiftCard Coupon.) Since I'm fairly new I don't know how much of these cards are taken up by saves. Would it pay to buy two of these cards now instead of only getting one?

I'll have my PS2 later this month, it's being held for me since I found out that they are discontinuing the PS2 combo packs with the network adapter included and I wanted to save some cash by getting a system with the network adapter and extras for the same price as just the plain system.

Do a search on this subject, its been asked over and over and always gets the same answer.

I used third party memory cards before and my data kept being wiped. From then on, I've always stuck with the sony ones.

If you play sports games, definitely get two.

If not one will probably do you, especially if you tend to get rid of games after beating them and can thus delete the save files. Even if no, most game saves are pretty small with sports games and RPGs that save a lot of info being the main exceptions.