Dumping PS3 ISO images to an external hard drive
Dan Morrill (Program Director CityU of Seattle)
Interesting question on how to dump the PS3 ISO image to an external hard drive on the ripping blu-ray ISO images. The good thing about ISO images is that they can also be mounted using Alcohol or Daemon Tools, there are a lot of good tools on how to do the actual mount. The dump of the ISO image however requires some good tools that can also be found on line.
The PS3 SAK (Swiss Army Knife) is the recommended tool as the feature set is fairly impressive. It can be downloaded from just about anywhere on the Internet, and is in version 1.0 right now. The tools that come along with it are:
Check Blu-Ray Disk size
* Format internal PS3 HDD
* Back-up iSO to internal PS3 HDD
* Back-up iSO to external EXT3 HDD
* Back-up iSO via wired network, to Windows Network Share
* Explore HDD (Linux side), and download files to a PC.
* Explore Blu-Ray Disks, and download files to a PC (with UDF 2.5 Support!)
* Reboot console
* Reboot console to PS3 GameOS
* Poweroff console
They also have some notes on this one:
Note: With SAK v1.00 you can now dump your PS3/Blu-Ray disc images without installing PS3 Linux, however, you must still format the PS3 HDD prior (as if you were going to install PS3 Linux) in order to install/use the OtherOS - this is a $ony requirement unfortunately.
How to install: using a memory or USB stick, or CD-R, etc… Copy "otheros.bld" (included in the RAR archive) & "otheros.self" (see below) to "/PS3/OTHEROS/". Insert your removable media and from the XMB (Settings -> System Settings) run "Install Other OS." Set the default boot to OtherOS, reboot, and you should be good to go.
You can get to the link here and here, or you can use this google search. There is also a video, shown below on how the program runs, and the video can be amusing at times.

PS3 SAK (Swiss Army Knife):

If you have money and want to spend money on technology, Team Xecuter has a PS3 HDXT that fits into the drive caddy of the PS3 allowing you to swap out hard drives at will, without having to understand a lot of the issues that come along with swapping hard drives in the PS3. The features of the hard drive extender are:
Connect any 3.5" SATA Hard Drive to the PS3
Developing ability to connect IDE hard drive
Supports up to 750GB (maybe more thats all we have here to test so far)
Switch between external HYPERDRIVE and internal 2.5" HDD
HYPERDRIVE USB2.0 Support to dump data to/from HDD
So that would be the way to dump data from the PS3 internal drive to any external hard drive. Good question and thanks to adfamily2 for asking the question.