@Feylic: What you are talking about is, CAV and CLV drives, not whether if it's CD, DVD or BD drive.
CLV (constant linear velocity) is usually preferred in playback devices, due to constant bitrate and CAV (constant angular velocity) is preferred in data storages, due to faster overall speed.

BD is very fast, because of the amount of data it's supposed to transfer. But, if i recall, 8 times BD transfer rate is the fastest it can go, because of the disc rotation speed starts to cause the disc to rumble above the 8 times speed.

@Leo-J: You can't cache data on a read-only memory. The whole idea is to read in advance the data you are going to need next and remove the data you don't need. Basically RAM is a cache.

@ bdbdbd

@ bdbdbd: I know i'm talking about CAV and CLV drives, and it does matter for CD, DVD and BD drives, as a DVD is a CAV and BD are CLV. Also, 8x is not the fastest it can go, right now it's more like 12x, but you have to keep in mind that DVD 1x is 10.55 Mbit/s while BD 1x is 36 Mbits/s. So an 8x BD would be much faster than a 8x dvd.

Edit: Was beaten to the post, max is higher than 12x now

Well that proves it, the blu drive 2X is adaquate enough for games, I Mean we put up with slow loading time in the PS1.

I was referring to the minute long load time at the beginningof the game. It's nothing compared to Motorstorm but it's still an annoyance.

For the people who say that the PS3's blu-ray drive read speed is adequate. The PS3 reads at 8 MB/s while the 360 reads between 8.2 and 16.5 MB/s. Additionally, the 360's DVD drive is CAV which means that it allows for lower seek times. With CAV drives, the most commonly accessed data is pushed to the outer edge of mastered game disks where it is read at the maximum speed. These differences mostly account for the difference in performace between the PS3 and 360 in terms of load times. Even with the same amount of data stored on each disk a Blu-ray player would need to be 4x to outperform a 12x DVD drive. The 2x Blu-ray drive of the PS3 simply isn't fast enough in my opinion.

@ bouzane

I always like to help to rid the world of misinformation like this...

"For really old Blu-Ray drives (like 3 years ago). The PS3 uses a fairly compact triple wavelength OPU.

From my own personal experience testing a Sony BD-RE drive (actually uses a Panasonic drive mechanism) and a Hitachi-LG drive of similar specs, for similar sized data sets the BD drive typically has almost the same if not significantly faster random seek times. That's generally because data sets between 4-8GB span the entire disc for for DVD-ROM while only covering a third of a BD-ROM, so on average a BD-ROM is going to have seek times in the range 50-100ms with a worst case scenario of around 200-230ms. The DVD-ROM drive will average between 110-150ms with a worst case scenario of around 170-230ms.

Of course once you start getting into larger data sets that that Blu-Ray can handle the average and worst case scenarios (which is an entire disc sweep which takes around 350-400ms) will eclipse the worst case conditions on a DVD-ROM. That being said, even with 23+GB of data with a 100 randomly generate seek sectors I still get around 100ms on average. Besides, if you find the need to randomly jump around to random sectors greater than 4GB in span, then your title has bigger issues than the capabilities of the drive."

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=42157&highlight=speed&page=2

"2x Blu-ray Drive (72Mbps(9MB/s))
Single Layer (2http://www.neogaf.com/forum/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=10460097
NeoGAF - Reply to Topicx CLV) - Constant Linear Velocity (Same speed across entire disk)
Double Layer - Couldn't find any data but no games have been released on a double layer yet.

Entire Blu-ray Disk is read at 9MB/s.

12x DVD-Rom Drive SL (9.25MB/S-15.85MB/s(AVG ~8x(10.57MB/s) DL (4.36MB/s-10.57MB/s(AVG ~6x(7.93MB/s)
SL(DVD-5) 12x Max (5-12x Full CAV) - Constant Angular Velocity (Speed Varies from edge to edge)
DL(DVD-9) 8x Max (3.3-8x Full CAV) - Constant Angular Velocity (Speed Varies from edge to edge)

SL DVD is 1.57MB/s > SL Blu-ray
DL DVD is 1.07MB/s < SL Blu-ray

Majority of 360 games are on DVD-9."

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=42157

Note single layer 360 DVD games are small enough to fit easily on the PS3 harddrive entirely, which of course loads a lot faster than either PS3 Blu-Ray or 360 DVD.

I don't mind the installs as long as they remain optional. No forced install in fantastic news though

@ bouzane

@Feylic: I believe they all are CLV by standard.

My info about the maximum speed seems to be a little outdated.

My point wasn't the comparision between DVD and BD as the actual bitrate (notice i mentioned BD being fast), but the bitrate in relation to the required bitrate.

@MikeB

Thanks for the info, I didn't know that dual layer DVDs could only be read at 8x speed on the 360. I guess the 360's read speeds aren't all that great either.