Yeah, but i dont think they are compressing everything, like sound.  They are trying to leave as much uncompressed or as little compressed as possible

Wow, I guess I missed the small print. Wtf? Why are they doing this? Is it simply due to low drive speed or something? 500Gb HDD in the face of mandatory 30-50Gb installs is worse than a memory card on a PS2. Basically, what they're saying is, add in the price for another TB HDD!! Lame.

They need to stream big textures for the game looks better now and the Blu-ray drive is not fast enough... so they are installing almost everything on HDD.

Nope that would be a nice track since they have at least two F1 cars and a bunch of indy racing cars.  Anyway nice info and the picks also confirm that the cases are the same size as blu-ray movies and PS3 and PS4 games.

Are we sure this info is not referring to installing the game discs as a whole for quicker/smoother load times? I find it hard to believe that any game could take up 20GB plus on disc and then require just as much space on HDD. At worst case scenario this must just be due to rushing these games to meet launch deadlines like with PS3. This won't/cannot stand for the rest of the Gen. We would need 20TB Drives!!!! D:

It's not a partial install like with the PS3, but a full install like what was optional on the 360. As we switch to a digital future this is the only way.

But drives are a lot faster now they have up to 16X drives now and my guess the X1 and PS4 should have at least 12X that should be fast enough for most games.

16x? 12x?

Both are 6x (confirmed)... there is no BD-Drive over 8x I guess.

Edit - There is one model 15x... fastest in the world from Pionner.

Do you remember the controversy about the digital versions of GTAV running worse? That's because when the game is on disc and using partial installs it can read data from both the disc and hard drive simultaneously. The digital version can't do this for obvious reasons making it have worse pop in and worse loading.

Next gen with such a huge push for digital, no way can a company make the digital version run worse. Thus the simplest solution is to make every game effectively digital.

Wow if the first batch of games take up near 50 GB imagine games 5 years into these consoles life cycles.