things are color coded and only fit into one socket and they STILL mess up.

On the upgrading your Hard drive, are games and paid for DLC locked onto your HDD or can you transfer them? I'm not sure if PS3 is like the Wii in the regard that the content is memorized by your system or like the 360 where they have to do it for you. Though now you can fix it and re-issue the rights for your 360 over your network though only 1 time per year..

I don't think you can copy stuff like that. Though you can back up all the data on your hard drive including that stuff into an (encrypted) file. Basically an archive. Not sure if it will work with other PS3s though...might only work for your specific one. Haven't tryed it with another PS3.

Game installs are a double edged sword.

They allow you to work beyond the standard limits of a console (data transfer on HDD is way faster than anything DVD/Blu-ray offers) yet you also get the HDD-full problem.

Which, frankly, sucks when it happens. You'll have to delete data to make your new game fit.

Due to the fact that all PS3s have hard drives, it is considered part of the overall system architecture to the game developer. Since it is one of the resources available to them, they will use it. Many a developer have mentioned the problem of storage on the 360 (due to the lack of hard drive in the arcade). If Sony wanted to end installs, they should release a PS3 without a hard drive which they won't. I appreciate the fact that Sony fully supports the ability to upgrade your hard drive and doens't force you to buy a proprietary drive for an obscene amount (looks at MS).

hmm its a hard question to answer...

Basically i own 18 retail games and 4 PSN titles and have 11gb free space on my HDD - i have a 60gb PS3 btw.

Ohh and i own MGS4, DMC4, Warhawk, AC, Heavenly Sword, GTA4, etc -- so it's not like i only games which don't have large installs.

Now imho 20gb owners should know how to swap the HDD -- since the 20gb was the first model to be discontinued and PS3 was selling preety bad -- and even then the majority of consoles sold were the 60gb, i doubt 20gb owners will have trouble with installs (unless they refuse to upgrade the HDD)

40gb owners are proberly now starting to feel the pain of installs and will be forced to decide between keeping that MGS4 install or that GTA4 install in order to play the next game with a big install -- but most 40gb owners will either know how to delete installs / swap the HDD or will not own enough games to run out of HDD space (most casuals buy less than 20 games for a console)

60gb owners -- they lie between 20gb and 40gb owners. The ones with trouble should know what their doing. The ones without trouble aren't likely to have trouble since you would need a fair bit of content to run out of room.

80gb owners -- can't seem them in trouble any time soon...

You can just delete them when you are done with the game. It literally takes 2 seconds to do this. I just deleted my Oblivion file, a game I don't plan on revisiting for quite some time.

If you bought a 20 gig you more or less knew what you were getting yourself into in terms of space restrictions, and you knew there would be space restrictions. There are probably less than a million 20 gig models on the market anyways.

It's a good thing someone brought this out, but doesn't USB HDD:s work in PS3, so that you can put your installs and PSN titles to it?

Someone buying a 10-20 games over a lifetime does not make them technically astute. But it could mean they will run out of space, especially if there are more 4-5gb installs in the future.

Its not that its difficult for people to uninstall a game when prompted, its just that if you have 3-4 games that require big installs not installed due to space. Then every time you want to play them it could take 10 minutes to start a game.

I doubt the 20gb owners were told or ever expected that there would be installs of 5gb or more for a single game. The fact that there are few of them doesn't make it good... So why should a 20gb owner *have* to upgrade his/her console or suffer waiting for things to install all the time? That seems unfair from Sony... Especially considering that a 20gb owner is probably on average quite a big PS fan.

I am really dissapointed with that list of games, lots of them are straight forward types of games like shooters and sports games and they have to have an install, wtf.  I can understand a game like gta or mgs or assassin's cread because they are games with bigger worlds that need loading but MLB08?! Skate?! Virtua Fighter?! Seriously.  That is lazy coding if you ask me.

Uncharted had no in-game loading times or installations.