[pseudohippy]

Unfortunately the IGN article doesnt cover all I said. But I found the IGN link anyhow talking about Bungie and Halo3. From there I surfed around and found a developer quote saying in the future load times will be cut significantly, but I cant seem to find it. Here are the key paragraphs from the IGN article.

so Bungie developer Mat Noguchi took some time to explain the problem on Bungie.net.

Basically, Halo 3 uses a special partition of the Xbox 360 hard drive as scratch memory to quickly load maps. Because it's pulling data from one device (the DVD drive) and copying it to another (the HDD) the software can do both at once. But when the game is installed solely to the hard drive, it can't easily perform both operations simultaneously and thus the process is slowed down significantly. If you want to geek out about things like read/write heads and data copy ratios, then head over to the Bungie.net post and read more.

But the bottom line is that, for games that were developed and released before Microsoft released specs on the new hard drive install feature, performance may actually decrease with full game installation rather than increase. Bungie is now recommending that you not install Halo 3 to the hard drive if you want the game to perform optimally. Will other developers come forward and do the same?

Every game is developed differently, and it could be that some titles will see a performance increase when installed to the hard drive, but for now that will have to be judged on a case-by-case basis.



Here is the link to IGN with the info:IGN: 360 Hard Drive Install Gimps Halo 3