You'd have to stuff up real bad to void the warranty. The actual removal of the cradle involves unscrewing the 1 blue screw. It's easier than refilling the car or removing the cap. It's really that easy.

The fact the instructions are in the manual.....

it says how to do it in your owner's manual.

That is mostly because HDD manufacturers call 1,000,000,000 bytes 1 GB, while the PS3 sees 1,073,741,824 bytes as 1 GB.

Yes, I know.

I've heard that the PS3 also takes a bit of room off of the HD.

320MB equals 298GB formatted as measured by the PS3. (32,000,000.00/1,073,741.824) = 298

If you have access to an external USB HDD (fat32 format), it's best to create a back up of your HDD image (System Settings - Backup Utility - Back Up), which will archive everything down to your game saves. It's good to have a back up anyway in the instance that something kills your HDD, but not too many people do this for some reason.

If not, back up your game saves on a USB thumb drive. It's tedious if you have a lot of saves. You'll have to re-download all your PSN games and demos again.

You can pop the HDD marked cover with a fingernail. Won't scratch.

The blue caddy lock screw can be a bit sticky (it's coated and machine tightened), leading to a stripped head if you use the wrong size driver.

A #1 Phillip's found in electronics screwdriver sets fits perfectly, but you may have to use a set of toothed pliers to provide the torque leverage. Just keep pressure on the screwdriver by pushing it into the screw head while applying torque with the pliers. It doesn't take much force with the pliers before you hear a slight crack as the screw loosens.

Use the same technique to loosen the four caddy screws holding the HDD in place to avoid stripping the screw heads.

Any S-ATA 2.5" drive should fit. Best drives to use in terms of reliability are widely accepted as Seagate and then WD. The OEM 60GB HDDs were Seagate Momentus drives.

Once the replacement drive's in the PS3, upon boot up, it will prompt you twice to reformat the drive, after which, it will restart and all your games, saves, demos, video/media will be gone. The latest firmware update is on flash ROM, and will still be present.

Go back to System Settings - Backup Utility and click Restore once your backup external USB HDD is plugged in and all your data from your original drive will be on your new drive.

Best way to swap drives is with a Backup archive on external drive. Keep the backup archive in case anything goes wrong and you reformatted the original HDD.

Ahh, that makes sense now. So when I saw 263GB free after the cutover to the 320gb it's like this. 320gb is really 320 x 1,000,000,000 bytes instead of 320 x 2^30 bytes. In reality, about 296 real GB. And then the PS3 equates using real GB's so 263Gb (what I had left) is about equal to 280ish exact 1bill byte GB's. All makes sense. LOL.

It's a common misconception.

Consumer confusion

As of 2007, most consumer hard drives are defined by their gigabyte-range capacities. The true capacity is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most manufacturers of hard disks and Flash disks define 1 gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes, the computer operating systems used by most users usually calculate a gigabyte by dividing the bytes (whether it is disk capacity, file size, or system RAM) by 1,073,741,824. This distinction is a cause of confusion, as a hard disk with a manufacturer rated capacity of 400 gigabytes may have its capacity reported by the operating system as only 372 GB, depending on the type of report.

The difference between units based on SI and binary prefixes increases exponentially — in other words, an SI kilobyte is nearly 98% as much as a kibibyte, but a megabyte is under 96% as much as a mebibyte, and a gigabyte is just over 93% as much as a gibibyte. This means that a 500 GB hard disk drive would appear as "465 GB". As storage sizes get larger and higher units are used, this difference will become more pronounced.