At work I use a USB2 to IDE adaptor to backup hard drives with Acronis. The cable was dirt cheap, you can pick them up on ebay for less than £10 delivered and they will do full and laptop IDE drives and SATA all in one.
Basically you just connect the hard drive that you want to back up to one end of the lead and plug the other end into your PC and it shows up as an external hard drive, you can then copy the files to the PC or use imaging software like Acronis or Ghost to make a full image of the drive that you can then dump the image back onto the new drive using the same cable.
I have to do this all the time at work to back up drives running OS/2 that have no other options for backup, it should work just fine for imaging PS3 HD's too as software like Acronis will image any drive regardless of it's format.
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BFBC2 - ROG69. GW - Ranger Rog. PSN Rog-69
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