I'm waiting until Gamescom without a PS3 to get a new one. It's a painful wait.

Just giving me piece on that part.

If you wait for Gamescom and there's a price drop, the value of your current PS3 will go down DRASTICALLY. If you're at all worried about having so survive another YLOD, or any other hardware malfunction for that matter, it may ease your mind more to just get the latest and greatest model. My advice is to sell your current PS3 as soon as possible (on eBay or Craigslist, NOT GAMESTOP), and then pick up the redesigned, pricedropped, bigger HDD'd, slimmed and trimmed model after Gamescom. The only downside to this is plan is that you may have to wait a bit for the new model and not have a PS3 in the meantime (unless you have a buddy that has one).

Or just get yourself a bigger internal HDD, like some other people were saying. Good luck with whatever you choose.

Just wait, get the really small PS3. Unless you think it's ugly, then look for an older small PS3, their buttons used to light up.

After reading the OP I thought to myself "WTF why just upgrade the HDD". After reading your responses this seems like a solid plan though, considering you already had 1 YLOD.

I reformatted my HDD before selling my PS3, it can take a few hours FYI

I'm thinking if Sony's conference is on the 14th, I'll sell on the 13th and buy on the 15th...how's that?

Whatever you decide to do, good luck transferring all the data to the new hard drive/PS3. I backed up my PS3 today with about an 80GB file, took about 3 hrs! That's just backing it up, you have to restore it too then! LOL!

You can't sell stuff instantly, so sell early. Also stuff leaks, like BP oil rigs.

You don't need to have the Playstation in order to deactivate it. You can remotely deactivate all of them at once via your account on playstation.com

I know I have twice the HDD space as you but have you thought about downloaded only one or so PS+ titles at a time? As long as you "purchase" them they will be in your download list for later downloading, even if they aren't free anymore. Though 80gb isn't much now, I have 160gb and am doing just that while still having a ton of games on my HDD. You can also make room by deleting game data, not save data. Game data is all the installs and isn't worth keeping on old games since if you ever get those games again they will just reinstall and update the game data. The new HDD option is pretty good too though.

The YLOD issue could be a concern but I'm not sure if fixed models are more likely to get it again. You would lose BC most likely since the new rumored model probably won't have it. You can always remove activation on a computer if you forget.

This is how I upgraded my 80GB PS3 back in 2008 or 2009 with a 500GB hard drive. I have just recently gotten to point where I worry about storage management. I can't imagine what I would do if I only has 80GB.