Each load time in game is usually no more than 5-10 seconds (PS3 anyways), so saving say 1 second in-between loads during the game won't really add up to much.

Microsoft said it would offer 40-60% decrease in load times, so 15 seconds out of a minute and a half isn't even 20%. So unless you turn on and off your game alot, I don't see why the 10 minute install would be worth it, all your doing is wasting harddrive space, and you still need to put the game disc in to play anyways.

I see it as worth it as long as I'm not waiting to play the game.  The good thing about these installs is that I have a choice when I install it.

Also, 40-60% decrease off a 5-10 load time (any time you see a loading screen you generally have more than a 5 second wait) that means you have shave 2-5 seconds each load.

Installs to the HDD are a god send, if done right and all load loads vanish. I am just not a fan of install 5 - 10 min, loads 15 -20 sec. That is when it is obvious that the dev team does not have a grip on the hardware. In any case it is nice to see that I can install games that I play a lot, because over time I will save time.

Ought to definatly be worth it when I replay Mass Effect right before ME2 comes out.

I think games that stream... this wont help so much, but loading games it will probably help alot... Fable started up way faster and I think that GTA4 starts up asstons faster as well... I bet it makes Mass Effect way faster

I'd do this for games that play kinda poorly, and have sluggish menus. I bet it would be great for Fable 2, Fallout, and Mass Effect. I would make no difference at all for Dead Space, though.

Fable 2 killed my DVD drive. It spun non-stop for the past 3 days. Now I have an unplayable disc error. It was my launch system. Now I'm breaking in my Elite.

So yes, hard drive installs are better, not only for load times, but it will help prolong the life of your DVD drive.

DVD drive failure is not covered by the 3 year warranty.

I never had any DVD failure but I will upgrade my HDD so that the terrible spinning noise will vanish...

Not surprising, the games are optimised for DVD loading.

On the Amiga the bulk of games came supplied on diskettes with their own optimised loading routines (often using custom file systems), with WHDLoad you can patch such games to install to the harddrive if the game originally did not support this feature. Some games take just as much time to load in-game though, those who don't sometimes needed to be altered by the patch designer (also for adding additional features such as highscore saving, bug fixes, discswap requester removal, copy protection removal, etc).

Wonder if it will reduce all of the in game loading in Lost Odyssey. If so it will give me a good reason to go back and finish the game.