So today I had another reason to call in to Sony, finally got around to trying to play RFOM online and it wouldnt work. So I called in. Not much help on that, but while on with them the gent said he could see my previous ticket about hard drive and asked if id resolved the issue.

Ensuing long discussion basically backs up what I know.

1) the gent from Sony assured me that outside of my own data there should be nothing on the PS3, that I can upgrade the harddrive and not invalidate my warranty and that if i do change the harddrive I wont damage the unit and need no OS install CDs to get the unit back.

So the 11Gb missing on the harddrive at initial boot intrigued the hell out of this guy.

He had me run a system format quick and then a full , took approximate 4 hours to run both. At the end I was sat with a brand new clean hard drive of manufacturer size 60Gb, showing 55Gb in size with 47Gb available.

The gent I was talking to is saying this isnt right and is escalating to tier 3 technical support (the ones who change the coffee filters) so who knows maybe I will find an answer to this vacuous space eating thats going on.

As an aside I still cant play rfom online.. sigh.