How low can you go in the chain of asking people moronic questions? A clerk and a "Sony retail" representative... what's next, asking homeless people questions on the street?

Hilarious news, but this ain't Sony commenting on the "issue" (which was debunked a long time ago) at all.

lol

Crashes can cause read errors on a hard drives so any company who "makes" a game crash may damage your ps3's hdd (if accessing data at the time).

My computers up over the ages have crashed many times during read operations, so has my Xbox360 a few times, but none of it has corrupted or destroyed my hard drives. The same goes for the PS3 and any other machine, obviously.

well, you had luck, I just replaced My WD 3d0 SE 16, because I was charged, touched the pc, and boom, it shuts off, and my Boot drive, went... clicck clickk clickk, and die :D

Been a PC tech for 10 years and have seen lots of dead HDDs from read errors caused by crashes, i'm looking at an 80GB HDD on my work desk right now thats has them. Over the years i have had to change lots.
look at it like this - if your systems has a crash/freeze/whatever and the read head of the HDD has not been moved from the disk platter (this goes for pc, xbox or ps3, all HDDs are the same) then on reboot/startup the platter can "wobble" which can cause the read head to come into contact with the disk platter, this can cause errors to form on the HDD. Also if the HDD is writing data at the time of a crash it may become corupt and you may lose any save date you have. I'm not saying this will happen if your system has a crash, just that if it crashes often then the chances are higer.
Anyways, back to the system crashing because it's built into it . . BS, it's crashing becasue the code is crap. If they wanted to stop people playing for long times then code a timer into the system, say after 3 hours your game goes on pause and a timer counts down for 5 mins, or a message pops-up saying "please rest" but making it freeze/crash come on how inept are these people.