@dudders: I think Uncharted 3 has some bugs and they never really got it down. The devs asked on their forums for people with this sort of problem to mail in their devices because they couldn't replicate it after a few months of claiming this was only an issue for people using after-market HDDs (and technically they didn't need to support users who were using non-stock PS3 and couldn't have tested for those edge cases).
My PS3 Slim 320GB (stock) was only 2 months old when I played the game and has not had any issues since. Here is how it broke for me and was the same symptoms I read over and over online as I looked into it:
The sounds stop. The music, the effects, it all goes quiet but you're still playing the game. A while later the AI breaks down or the level chunks stop loading. The first time I got to this repeatable failure the actual 'crash' was when I hit a level-load for a cutscene and rather than load into the cutscene the game went to black and sat there (10 mins later, still nothing, optical drive had spun down). It was a good 15 seconds earlier that the audio broke. I could reload my checkpoint over and over (after resetting the console to get into the game again) and see this crash. The XMB could be brought up and even the prompt to skip cutscene (pressing the button didn't actually skip anything) so it wasn't hard-crashing the system but you could never progress. I tried restarting the entire level and perfectly on cue the audio dropped out. I stopped moving, walked around in silence, died and went back to the last checkpoint. Repeatedly I could poke at this and work out where there was presumably a trigger for a data load that failed and took out the audio subsystem with it. Whenever I got to the point where that failed load was needed to transition to the cutscene then black screen.
I deleted the 1.15 patch data and played that level with the 1.0 launch patch (which also takes out the better weapon handling from Uncharted 2 that got patched in - I am amazed the devs got in fans to tell them how to go back to U2 handling because it doesn't exactly seem hard to pin down exactly what they changed to make it worse with the 1.0 handling, if you play them back to back and even without any access to the source code) and didn't get the audio fail and then crash that time but maybe I was just unlucky a few times and lucky after reverting the patch (deleting the data file for the patch). I repatched afterwards to get access to the better analogue stick curves/deadzones.
Later I saw the 'assets fail to load' stuff that wasn't flat out crashing the game. If you've ever wanted to look at the level in a console game but can't due to not having access to the mapping tools them Uncharted 3 gives you a few spots (at least for me) where the load system breaks, audio dies for a bit, and you can see large chunks of the surface of a level not load and so see the stuff as if you had fallen out of the level. Only you're in the level still, you just haven't got the chunks between you and the distant stuff that should be obscured.
So try deleting the patch file and play the 1.0 edition for a bit if you're getting something that sounds like what I (and forum chatter says quite a lot of others) have experienced. It might not solve your problem but that's how I finished the disc version of the game (European PS+ just got the digital single player version and I'm tempted to give it a go and see if the same bug is in whatever release is current one day).
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