PS3 hardrive or surfing online?

[terjeber]

Originally Posted by Caligula

As you know videos or images can contain Viruses and will destroy hardware if not protected.

Don't worry about this. You have a couple of things wrong.

1. A video or an image can not typically contain a virus, a virus is executable code and must reside in a program, there are some exceptions but these are all tied to bugs in things like JPEG rendering code etc (overflow errors). Quite rare, and quite hard to exploit actually. I don't really know of any virus spreading like this, even in the well-known buffer-overflow cases. Virii spreads when people download executables - games, pirated software, free software from sources they don't know.
2. A virus can not really damage your hardware

So, don't worry. You are pretty much 100% guaranteed not to get a virus from downloading an image or a video. In theory you can get virii from downloading games demos, since those are executables however this is also rather far-fetched since there are currently 0 known virii for the PS3.