Apparently the 80010514 error doesn’t mean anything to Sony, either

According to Eurogamer, Sony has denied knowing anything about the now mysterious error code that some PS3 owners have reported seeing, following the failure of their Blu-ray drives. Not to be confused with that other set of fictional unlucky numbers, this one is purported to have real life consequences.

However, if Gamerevolver is to be believed, the error and the drive failure are somehow coincidental in nature, and not related:

"Since this error occurred, we obviously contacted Sony Support. We were informed that the code is not common, and a simple reset of the system, and restoral of factory settings should do the trick. Unfortunately, after the restoral, the error still occurred. So, we dug a bit further, and this is what we found.

The error code is actually one of two things, a) a faulty sector on the internal hard drive, or b) a faulty installation of software/firmware, both iterations actually coincide with each other. If the hard drive suffers a faulty sector (a section of damaged space on the drive that data may have been written to that no longer is readable), an installation may still be processed, and even work, but the error can cause some serious side effects, such as option b. If your PS3 has installed an item incorrectly, including firmware, it is in high risk of receiving this error."

So the plot thickens. Now even more questions come to mind. Are we now dealing with two separate, yet minute (in terms of total failures reported) problems that we can expect to see a minority of PS3 owners to experience, or are these truly cause and effect? An even greater question has to be thrown out there: Since the failure rate of the PS3 seems to be well within reasonable standards for a piece of electronic equipment, why does it look as if Sony is being mum on the subject?