Except that it would seem that unconnected people at different websites all come to the same assessment of you independently, and its to a scarey degree how the assessments are so alike, and most of it negative. Now, you can continue living life thinking everyone else must be nuts, or maybe it should clue you in to the fact that its seems you have some problems.

I don't mean you any offense, honestly, but it should probably give you pause.

One thing that MikeB got right is that there are several models of 360 DVD drives. Maybe some are slower (it would be interesting to see install times on old 360 models).

Still, it seems almost all developers have problems with PS3's BD drive... even those making exclusives like MGS4. This tells me that the PS3 is not better, and probably slightly worse in terms of optical media performance.

I read amigaworld.net.  And some of the amiga threads were slow lately.  So in their "free for all" forum I came across all these ridicuously long console threads.  And I was like, "my God, why is this guy here being so fervent, why here with so much effort for such a small game console audience at this site".  So then I did some googling.  And then some reading here and there at the search results.  And then I realized, he is talking there about it so much because in other places he is often dismissed and/or insulted outright at this point.  So he must be running out of places basically that will give him thoughtful answers.

Err, why would they be slower? It makes absolutely no sense that they be slower or faster between models. Its like my asserting to you that new models of Xbox 360s come with 1GB of ram because that would be better than 512MB.

I see. This would mean though that those installation times were tested on a SL 16x DVD-ROM drive...I thought MS just used different make 12x drives? Very confusing...

@Squilliam / Fumanchu: I'm just saying, it's possible the different drives have slightly different speeds. However I don't see a reason why one would read at 8x and another at 12x, it's not like developers can rely on everyone having the newer models.

The only reason I can see for MS to use different drives is to get cheaper prices...

Whats the Point??? I have several multiplats on both console's

Take RE5 for example it runs great on both with a long install time on the PS3.

the PS3 however only allows one user profile to work while playing the game splitscreen.

so if I want trophies and my son does too. we have to have 2 ps3 or play the game twice as much.

the 360 allows upto 4 different gamertags to login at once on one console.

being a better multiplayer system or thbest multiplayer system cost wise.

and your worried about disk space????? what bout the games you can play.

File system's are under development all the time and improved upon. So who is to say this issue wont be solved by way smarter techies then you tomarrow??? Storage won tbe the system killer.

Except that Microsoft bought the fastest drives they could at the time. Im sure if they could have had a 16* (Impossible to get commercially IIRC) they would have done it.

You are correct and incorrect: you're correct that seek times are faster on DVD than on Blu-ray, and that seek time is important to console games, but you are incorrect in assuming that MikeB will ever admit this.  

I find it amusing that some people are arguing that seek times are not important for games stored on optical discs.  DVD and Blu-Ray are *primarily* designed to stream data, i.e. - music and movies when are for the *most* part read in a linear fashion.  That's why those formats use a large spiral track instead of the concentric tracks and sectors employed by hard drives and diskettes.  Hard drives and diskettes are designed for random access, i.e. - programs and separate data files read in a NON-linear fashion.

So what does this tell us?  That seek times are VERY important when playing a game that is stored primarily on a DVD or Blu-Ray disc, because the data will to a large degree NOT be accessed in a linear fashion.  This is why Oblivion on a DVD has one copy of each data file but on Blu-Ray has several copies of each file placed strategically on the disc... according to Bethesda, the random access times on Blu-Ray were NOT SUFFICIENT to provide acceptable performance:

http://www.gwn.com/news/story.php/id/11006/Oblivion_Developer_Blu-ray_Is_Slower.html

Finding the original Todd Howard interview is nearly impossible as EGM was a paper magazine and is now defunct.

No, it was possible. I have an Aopen AAP 1648 Pro...

Reads DL+R at up to 16x.

The reason it can be proven that ALL Xbox 360 drives is this...

Try making a dual layer disc filled with 6.8 GB of data...Then read it back on your PC.

Now try doing a game install with an Xbox 360 game you know is 6.8GB.

You will see that it is in synch with being read at 12x

It takes around 5-12 mins to install all Xbox 360 games (tops is 12 mins, sometimes a lot less but that's a rough guide)...

How long does it take to read 6.8GB of data at 12x....How long at 8x...

When installing on the Xbox 360 all it does is copy the game partition and make it small chunks (due to file system limit and to reduce fragmentation it makes these chunks only about 50mb in size each).

This image is then mounted when playing.

NO files are "expanded"\installed in the concentional PC sense - You are getting an exact copy of the disc.

I say this to answer any "ahh but the Xbox 360 is expanding files so there isn't as much data to copy"...