For the record, putting an SSD into a fatboy PS2 is as easy as getting a hard drive adapter and maybe some padding to keep it from sagging on the plug. Getting the hdloader installed isn’t much harder. I’ve had it like that since the PS2 network adapter was still easy to get for exactly that reason, and now there’s actual support for the network to be used to get games onto the drive! I used to have to pull the drive out, plug it into an enclosure, and slooowwwwwly copy stuff over via a USB 2.0 connection using an even slower program. (Oh IDE, I don’t miss you much.)

Anyway, these days, if you have a drive in there, and the system on your network, you can set it up as a networked drive and just copy stuff over that. I think you can even run off the network, though I don’t know how good that is loading speed wise.