By Rob Crossley
Bungie has placed a notice on its forums which advises owners of Halo 3 to not install the game to the 360’s HDD due to “increased loading times”.
The new option to install 360 games onto the console’s hard drive was added as part of the NXE package. The key benefits of the service are the reduced wear and tear of DVD drives and, theoretically, faster loading screens.
Installing Halo 3, however, will significantly increase the game’s loading times, a quandary which Bungie has decided to speak out on.
Bungie Chief Caching Officer Mat Noguchi explains that the way Halo 3 works with a 360 HDD is the root of the problem: “When Halo 3 runs, if a HDD is present, we copy maps from the DVD to the utility partition on the HDD.” As a result, if players install Halo 3 to the 360’s HDD, the game will still go about its normal procedure of copying maps to the utility partition.
The slow loading screens occur here because a 360 HDD mechanism is being asked to do two things at once when Halo 3 loads. “You read and write through the same mechanism (i.e. the hard drive read/write head) and those reads and writes cannot occur simultaneously through a single mechanism," Noguchi explains.
Bungie has also revealed that it has no plans to administer a fix for the problem. “The risks of doing that and the resources required has to be carefully considered against what could really be a rather insignificant change to the player experience," Noguchi says.
