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would a Japanese ps2 network adapter and hard drive work with an English ps2?
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The network adapter draws its power from the PS2's power supply, so there SHOULDN'T be any issues, as all PS2s use the same internal voltages.
Hard drives are the same the world over, and the network adapter only takes your standard IDE drives. You can use the official 40GB models, or just slap in pretty much any drive you want up to about 200GB. The PS2 only does 28-bit addressing, so it's a bit limited on size.
But why not just buy an English (when you say English do you mean PAL? Or do you mean American which would be NTSC) network adapter and hard drive? Actually scratch that I don't know why you would ever waste your money on the hard drive unless you're running Linux on it since it has absolutely no functionality.
A surprising number of Japanese games can be loaded onto the hard drive and played from there. Virtually all North American and European releases have this feature removed, save Final Fantasy XI.
The hard drive has other interesting uses if you know what you're doing. You can use it to store copies of your memory card(s) and all the saved games on there. So if you only have 1x8MB card, and it's getting full, you could store data on the hard drive. Some of those Japanese games can actually save to the hard drive, though that too seems to always be removed from NA and European releases. There are some other uses for it, but I won't get into those. I'll just say HDLoader and HDAdvance.
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