On the heels of the NXE launch, Bungie, developers of Halo 3 is warning users against performing a full install of Halo 3 to their Hard Drives. According to Bungie, Performing a Full Install of Halo 3 will actually increase load times, resulting in the exact opposite of the desired effect.
On the Bungie official website, Bungie Chief Caching Officer Mat Noguch posted a detailed explanation as to why it would not decrease load times:
The Xbox 360 HDD has a section for games to use called the utility partition. Games can use this section for whatever they want to; Halo 3 uses the utility partition to cache maps as they will load faster off the HDD than off the DVD. As a side note, the utility partition can be deleted when other games are played. This is why maps can take longer to load when you play another game in between various Halo 3 sessions. (As was the case with Halo 1 and Halo 2.)
So when Halo 3 runs, if a HDD is present, we copy maps from the DVD to the utility partition (on the HDD). Think of it as an on demand install of Halo 3 to some scratch space on the HDD. Halo 3 doesn’t actually know where it’s running from, so it always assumes it’s running from a DVD. This is an unfortunate consequence of new features (namely, install to HDD) being added to the Xbox 360 after Halo 3 shipped. And as a result, it means that even if Halo 3 is already installed to the HDD, it will still copy maps to the utility partition.
