ok question. i finally decided to upgrade my HDD. will do that soon now..

seriously, i thought that with 80gb model id be good for a while but DAYUM!!! that memory got sucked up like something terrible! (and all i have is games on it! no music or movies or anthing else!)

for anyone that knows. is there any way to save the games and information i have....well i guess i should ask can i TRANSFER the games and info i have from one the old HDD to the new one? like taking all the game info from the 80 to my....whatever im gonna buy. probably a 500gb

AND....(this ones just a random question)....does upgrading the HDD make the PS3 more liable to have a situation with the ylod as opposed to keeping everything factory? i know its made to be upgraded but does it in ANY way make the system more fragile? anyone know or heard of any reports about the relationship of the two circumstances.

If you've got an external hard drive (I think it has to be formatted to FAT 32) you can just backup your PS3 to it, and then do a restore after you've installed your new drive. Or you can use a USB stick and transfer stuff piecemeal to your PC, then copy it back when you've installed the new drive. There's some copy-protected stuff on there, so once you get everything else copied off and deleted, you can do a backup of the remaining stuff to the USB stick.

Don't know about reliability - I put a 500 GB drive in mine about a year ago and it's still working just fine. I've heard the 7200 rpm drives can produce a bit more heat than the stock drive, so I stuck with a 5400 drive just to be on the safe side.

If you've got an external hard drive (I think it has to be formatted to FAT 32) you can just backup your PS3 to it, and then do a restore after you've installed your new drive. Or you can use a USB stick and transfer stuff piecemeal to your PC, then copy it back when you've installed the new drive. There's some copy-protected stuff on there, so once you get everything else copied off and deleted, you can do a backup of the remaining stuff to the USB stick.

Don't know about reliability - I put a 500 GB drive in mine about a year ago and it's still working just fine. I've heard the 7200 rpm drives can produce a bit more heat than the stock drive, so I stuck with a 5400 drive just to be on the safe side.

Sure no problem. I think it's kind of complicated to format an external drive to FAT 32, it only wants to create a partition 32 GB big or something. Anyhow, something to research. You'll also want to download a copy of the latest firmware update from Sony to your PC and transfer it to a the USB stick.

http://us.playstation.com/support/systemupdates/ps3/

When you've got your new drive installed and are booting it back up, it will ask you some confusing question about being unable to continue or something, and that's what it wants.