Quote: "1. What's the reliability like? I've fixed quite a few friend's 360s that died from overheating and had to reflow the solder on some of them - quite a large design flaw."
All 9 my friends have a PS3 and only one of them overheated and that was the old 80GB model. Another friend has the first 60GB model and it's still working. I have a slim and gamed for hours and even fell asleep gaming once and the ps3 was still there waiting for me to unpasue the game.
Quote: "2. Does the latest firmware update still supporting Folding@Home?"
The name isn't "Folding@home" anymore as it's part of the "Life with Playstation" Program on the network menu. So, in a sense, yes it still does.
Quote: "3. How noisy are the fans? That said, my workstations all sound like jet engines, so anything will be an improvement!"
The Slims are very slient. As for the older model, if you had one for many years the fan will get noiser but it's nothing too serious.
Quote: "4. Is there any point transferring games to the HDD if I upgrade it to a 5,400 RPM 320GB?"
There is a "Backup Utility" & "Data Transfer Utility" on the PS3 System settings. You could use the "Data Transfer Utility" to transfer the data onto another HDD via a USB cable (or some other form). Then simply install the new HDD and transfer the data back. I have not tried this yet so I would not know if would work or not although im almost certain that it will work.
Quote: "5. Has anyone tried hooking it up to a NAS drive with audio data?"
Quote: "a NAS drive is sort of like an external hard drive, but connected to a network so lots of computers have access to it."
If it's anything like what I think it could be, The PS3 does suport media file sharing. If you have other PS3 or computers with the correct media sharing settings setup. You could stream music, videos, pictures and perhaps even files from other PS3 or PCs onto your PS3. Or I could be done backwards. If the HDD is connected to the network, it should pop up on the PS3 but you will need to go through some specfic steps in order to do this.
Quote: "Do Sony have any plans to reintroduce OtherOS any time soon?"
Im 90% sure they won't since they removed it because of many hacks on the ps3. Sony is very strict when it comes to this.
I Hope that answers most or all of your questions. If you have any more, let the forums Know!
Good Luck...
Computer Specs: Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 2.80GHz @ 1066Mhz FSB 3MB Cache, Dual Channel 8192MB DDR2 PC6400 800MHz RAM, XFX Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ 512MB, XFX 780i SLI Motherboard
