I just put a 500gb harddrive (Western Digital WD5000BEVT Scorpio Blue 500GB internal drive [2,5 Zoll, 5400RPM, 8MB Cache, S-ATA)] in my ps3 and restored the backup I did of my old 80 gb harddrive. It worked and everything, but when I played some games the load times seemed a bit longer and sometimes the game would totally stand still for about 3 seconds and then continue. In the fat princess demo it happened all the time and in Demon's Souls it only happened two times in a few hours. In PES 2010 going to the start menu in games definitely takes longer and load times during games are longer in general. Doesn't matter whether I'm online or offline.

Seems like a strange problem and I haven't found anything on it yet.
I already formatted the drive another time and put the data back on there again but it hasn't helped.
Now I don't know what I can still try out. Close to sending the drive back.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I had this in BFBC I think.. did the sound go on? but the image stuck?

try putting the PS3 back to manufactor settings.. I think that fixed it for me..

I had same problem and days later I found out that my harddrive had some sort of "sleep mode".

When the consoles not accessing it, it just stops. When the console needs to access it the drive needs to "wake up" first and then read the content. That's why it caused some freezes.

And it was a western digital 500gb also dude... :\
Solution I found: Buy a different harddrive *sigh*

is the drive speed in question (I have no idea if the original one is 7200 or 5400...)?

Don't Bigger HDD's have slower loading because it is harder to find the data?

I had the same problem with my 60gig PS3, I put in a 500gig and got skipping, freezing issues.

I took it out put in a 160gig, and I couldn't play downloadable games like Fat Princes or do game installs like with Valkyria Chronicles install, in the middle of the install the PS3 would just freeze, and I had to power it down.

So I put the 60gig back in and everything works, never did find the problem.

I even made a thread about it awhile ago.

Thx for the input.

I tried to set the system back to default, but it didn't help.

This hd was recommended as one of the best for the ps3, btw.
And I even know someone who has the same one working, so it's possible it's a bad pre-format.
To do a full format via the ps3 for this drive takes 28 hours, though.
And I'm not gonna do that as it might still be a different problem.

So, I'll just send it back and get the Samsung HM500JI 500GB internal drive instead.

People should just learn to killdisk the drives when they get them, and then format them to NTFS or FAT32, whatever it is....I'd never trust a pre-format....
I've put in a 350GB to my PS3, and a 500GB to my brother's, both run perfectly fine 1 year+ since installation....Drive size doesn't hurt load times