PS3 Install Times and HD Space

[ShadowMarth]

Props to Cadohacan on the Nintendo forums for this one.

Originally, Blu-ray Disc drives in production could only transfer approximately 36 Mbit/s (54 Mbit/s required for BD-ROM), but 2x speed drives with a 72 Mbit/s transfer rate are now available.

- Source - Wikipedia

Keep in mind this is Megabits..
1 megabit = 0.125 megabytes

So Sony announced that Ridge Racer would take up 5 gigabytes of space on PS3's hard drive..


Famitsu PS2 quizzed Teramoto on one area that's on everyone's mind right now: hard disk support. Ridge Racer 7 makes extensive use of the PS3's hard disk. In addition to saving your game and saving future download contents, the hard disk is used for speeding up gameplay. The game does a hard disk install to the tune of five gigabytes.

- Source - Famitsu (easily verifed by Google.)

(So since the Blu-Ray can't write fast or even cache the data fast enough, it has to rely on the hard drive.)



If you give Sony the benefit of doubt and assume both their consoles come with the latest blu-ray players.. (if they dont include high end blu ray models on their low end consoles, it takes more like a whole twenty minutes to install..)

5 gigabytes = 40,960 megabits..
40960 megabits / 72 (write speed per second) = 568 seconds
568 seconds / 60 = 9 minutes and 46 seconds.

Now consider the fact you have 20 GB on a low end model. You're going to beable to fit about four games total at any time, and a whopping twelve on your high end model.

Imagine how great it's going to feel to have to constantly uninstall, and reinstall these gignormus games every time you want to play. Are these people actually crazy?

http://forums.nintendo.com/nintendo/...70111#M2270111