I just bought a 40 gig ps3 that had no problems with its base configurations. I popped in a new 120 GB 7200.2 momentus hard drive, formatted it and apparently had no problems. The full size of the hard drive, about 111 gigs went into free space, and my games installed fine (although Devil May Cry 4 seemed to take longer but it might be my imagination or the fact that i was actually watching the installation bar this time)
After playing devil may cry for 10 minutes I noticed that the load times were unstable. Sometimes when i went through doors there was virtually no loading at all, and other times it took considerably longer than i remembered from my 5400 rpm hard drive. Finally, during a load session (when i tried to upgrade my skills), the loading bar never ended and i had to force a reboot.
I'm currently fully reformatting the hard drive, not quick format, and it has about 7 hours left.
Could it be a bad hard drive, a faulty quick format and OS install the first time around, or what? A friend said games might be optimized for 5400 rpm hard drives and that could cause the loading instability, but every source i've read says that at worst, games perform equal to the base configuration.
Does anyone have any insight or advice?