Rory McGuire, PS3 fanboy and lead game designer on the Bourne Conspiracy, should probably do his homework before speaking to the public. In a recent discussion with ComputerAndVideoGames McGuire said that it was a ‘mistake’ to not include a hard disc drive (HDD) with every Xbox 360.
He also added, "They did it with the original Xbox. I’m not sure why they decided to not require a hard drive on the 360. If you have a hard drive, the whole game loads faster… the developer benefits from it and you definitely benefit from it as a player." And this is true to an extent.
Unfortunately all the game data is stored on a disc to begin with. So you’re either pulling data off the disc onto the hard drive or pulling it off the disc into the memory and playing the game.
I, for one, like fewer steps. What Mr. McGuire neglected to talk about was the reason why Sony needed to include a HDD. That reason is Blu-ray. The Blu-ray drive in the PS3 reads 9216 kilobytes per second.
Impressive, if you ignore the fact that the 360 can read information 75% faster (16200 kbps). With read speeds that high a HDD is just not necessary. ConsoleWatcher said, "2x Blu-ray drives trudge along compared to a 12x DVD drive."
Each console has a bottleneck in the technology somewhere. For the PlayStation 3 it’s the BRD. Sony has tried to circumvent this problem by including an HDD in all their boxes. But there is still a hang up.
The PS3 version of Devil May Cry 4 has a 20-minute install at the start of the game, the Xbox 360 version has zero. After the install the PS3 version only kept up with its 360 counterpart. Loads are not any faster reports Penny Arcade, "I can tell you that the benefits of the twenty-one minute install are completely irrelevant."
However the next problem becomes the size of the drives. The aforementioned Devil May Cry install is 5 gigabytes. That’s 25% of the drive for some. Is it fair to require that much available space in ones HDD?
So while Rory McGuire may say things like "[not including a mandatory hard drive] was one of the mistakes that Microsoft made with the 360," you and I both know the opposite is true.
