It bugs me no end when companies produce a product and then dont provide their own staff with support information. The absolute worst company I've ever dealt with for support was philips, dont ever buy philips if you think you will need help, sony are usually very good with their products but the company is so big things fall through the cracks, its plain they are loosing so much money on this units they simply didnt invest money in training the support arm.

Further information on the hard drive system follows:

Yesterday I picked up a 100Gb 7200RPM Seagate 2.5" SATA drive for $168CDN.

TURN OFF YOUR PS3! before you do this, and even recommend you unplug the power.

I installed the hard drive last night. Instructions are actually in the manual that came with the PS3, this DOES NOT invalidate your warranty, very very easy to do. Only catch is you slide the hard drive mount forwards (towards the front of the PS3) before you can pull it out.

Swapping the hard drive is matter of 5 screws, all small philips head.

When swapped and the system is turned on it instantly recognizes the new hard drive and informs you you have to format it. Proceeding with a format its obvious by the time taken its simply a hard drive partition and quick format, it takes approximately 45seconds to complete on a 100Gb drive. No time at all to copy data to the drive, especially not a monolithic 8Gb operating system as the support guys claim. Anyone whose installed hard drives in a PC before can attest, its an identical time frame to doing a quick format.

Now the intestesting bit..

1) 100Gb hard drive = 1000*100= 97.66 nominal actual GB.
Shows up in the PS3 as a 93GB drive. Tallies with firmware issue misrepresenting hard drive size already identified in conversations with Sony.

2) Free space tallies out at 81Gb free.
Scarey shit!!

But this actually makes sense. Taking the original numbers from the factory drive in GB
Drive stated size | Actual Size | Reported Size | Free Space
60 |58.66 | 55 | 47
And the new
100 | 97.66 | 93 | 81

So on a 100Gb drive you loose approx 17% of the total drive actual size to the (lets call it the) Sony partitioning system.

On the Factory drive you loose 19%

There are margins for error in the reported drive size as manufacturers use different anotations, cluster/platters/sectors but basically Its safe to average out I should think and say that on any size drive you will loose approx 18% of the drive to this sony partitioning system.

What does this equate to.. be very carefull what size drive you replace in your PS3, your cost per GB will actually increase the more space you loose. So that 160Gb SATA drive that you paid $200, by the time you are done actually costs you with a ~28.8GB lost $1.52 not the $1.25 you paid per GB for.

Calculating back the percentages, and you see that the drive structure is in fact managed by some percentile layouts to determine reporting/size/free. This tallies and argues completely against info provided by sony support where they claim that the operating system takes up space on the drive. In fact the operating system takes up no space. The drive is actually misrepresented and formatted in accordance with space estimates based on percentage that sony think needs to be reserved.

IE sony didnt arbitrarily say they needed 8GB reserved for future considerations they reserved and created some formula by which to reserve space on a drive, and that space grows linearly with the size of Drive you install.

Be Warned.

What I can also state from this process is that the drive does not contain any part of the PS3 OS, it is as expected completely firmware resident, all settings on the PS3 remain when you do this process, the only thing you loose access to is save game and downloads. Even your PS3 online account remains after the hard drive swap.

Next step is to get a PS adapter figure out how to mount the OS and see about backing up data to transfer data from one drive to another so you dont loose your downloads.

More to follow soon as I have the adapter.