360 Rant Rave Forums

As you know, the NXE now allows us to install Xbox 360 titles to our hard drive.  This is done to make the 360 quieter (no constantly spinning drive) and to improve load times (things load faster from a HDD than from a DVD). 

Well, Bungie came out with info just yesterday, advising 360 users to not install Halo 3 to the HDD.  Unlike with other titles, installing Halo 3 on you 360 can actually decrease performance & increase load times. 

The reasons for this are somewhat complicated, but here’s an excerpt from bungie.net:

 ”When Halo 3 runs, if a HDD is present, we copy maps from the DVD to the utility partition (on the HDD). Think of it as an on demand install of Halo 3 to some scratch space on the HDD. Halo 3 doesn’t actually know where it’s running from, so it always assumes it’s running from a DVD. This is an unfortunate consequence of new features (namely, install to HDD) being added to the Xbox 360 after Halo 3 shipped. And as a result, it means that even if Halo 3 is already installed to the HDD, it will still copy maps to the utility partition.”

For the complete explanation, you can look HERE. 

We’re forced to wonder now if any other games might suffer from this same issue.  Hopefully MS will do a bit of research on this issue and let us all know. 

Game on!