I just hope I get mine back soon.  I've been itching to play some Uncharted.  I was only an hour in when it broke.

Huh?

lol wut?

just throwing it back atcha man.

Hard drives have gone down in reliability over the past decade because drive manufacturers are having to get more aggressive in the designs to keep increasing the storage densities.  In the 70's and 80's read/write heads rode on a cushion of air just above the disk.  Then in the 90's drive manufacturers needed to get the heads even closer to the media so they put ripples in the disk surface and allowed the ultra-light-weight heads to "skim" along the disk as they rode up and down in a sine-wave pattern (you can't allow the heads to touch the surface of the disk if both are really flat because both surfaces are now so finely made they're too "smooth", and "stiction" will cause the two surfaces to bond to each other.   The thickness of platters and heads are being pushed to new lows, requiring different materials to be used such as glass just to prevent wobble or surface deformation in the platters.  And they're also pushing the rotational speeds up.

So... hard drives are becoming much less expensive per byte, but more fragile in general.  It's the nature of the beast.

What would the failure rate of the PS3 hard drives be?  Who knows.  It depends on the hard drive Sony uses and how the hard drive is used.  The company I work for supports 5000+ enterprise desktops, and on more than one occasion we've had to just go through and replace large lots of hard drives because that particular model from that particular manufacturer is experiencing large numbers of failures.  We also see a lot of hard drives die prematurely due to too much "thrashing" depending on usage patterns, i.e. - the read-write heads are forced to constantly seek back and forth across the disk at high speeds.   Sony seems to have put high-quality components in the PS3, but I doubt they'll perform better than other high-quality components in the industry.

No problem with my 60gb launch unit, but i have had a couple games freeze on me, but that happens less then once for every 48 hours of gameplay, it also happened with a couple demo's the ATV one and the F1 one, but the atv one sucked so that was fine.

Oho ive only had my 360 freeze on my twice or 3 times
360 reliability> ps3????

heh jk

i was actually curious, my parents are thinking of getting a blue ray player, and i almost have them convinced for a ps3 instead, but one of the store workers said they had laser problems....

News to me. How would people know if there was a lens problem.

Well apparently, because the console is not ready BR anymore.
But as someone stated previously, it might be two seperate problems. One coming from hardware, other from software (a large part of reported incident happens with PES, but it might just be because it's such a huge game in France).

About the failure rate, of course it's not even close to the RROD. But Iwas just wondering if you heard about it on "local" forums, not just US or french ones, but in other countries, since VGcharterz are from various regions.

I've heard that the first batch of 40 GB ps3's in Europe is having this problem, 60 GB models should work fine.

never occured to me either..