With the release of the new Xbox experience, I figured it’d be great to take a look at each feature and gauge the thoughts of the community about them.  The first up is the “install to the hard drive” feature.  For those of you who have played Left 4 Dead, I’m sure you’re aware of the loading times.  To me they’re really a pain especially upon first starting the game.  So you can imagine that I was really excited to finally have a reason to go full blast on a game installation.

I decided this is as good a game as any to test this hard drive installation feature out to see how much time I could slice off of the loading times.  If you want to install to the hard drive, you have to press the Y button on the game block of the My Xbox Channel and choose the option.  Once you choose to install, you’ll be greeted to a nice install screen showing how much time is remaining.  The game size ended up being 5.0GB.  If you’re like me and you have a 20GB hard drive, then you know installing multiple games may not be something wise, if not impossible, due to the size of games.  Once the installation is complete, you’ll have an additional option on the menu; ”Play from Hard Drive”.  You have to press the Y button from the game block on the My Xbox Channel.

When I started Left 4 Dead I was surprised at what I experienced.  There was no change at all in the loading times or rather a change that was so minimal that I just didn’t notice.  I was excited initially to see this new feature work its magic but the magic was seemingly “left for dead” with this particular game.  I wasn’t saved from the frustration of waiting so I decided to just save my space for another hard drive installation that’ll produce better results.  So chalk Left 4 Dead up as one of the games that doesn’t make much use of the feature.

I’m not sure this feature will be used often by those with 20GB hard drives or even 60GB hard drives.  At most, you’ll get 4-5 games out of it if you’re an original Xbox 360 owner who hasn’t done much in terms of downloading.  But then, who really hasn’t downloaded enough to get you down to at least 8GB so that # is cut down to maybe 1-2 games.  I guess it’s a convenient way to entice you into spending for that 120GB hard drive.  Can someone say cut the price of these hard drives?

Keeping with the spirit of this article, I wanted to share some cool places with you to give you an idea of the size of most installations as well as a rough idea of the time you’ll likely save.  Each of these charts are unofficial but they do provide researched information that’s accurate especially the size chart.

- NXE Game Install Size Chart
- NXE Hard Drive Time Chart

What has your experience been with installing games to the hard drive?  Have you noticed any significant difference in loading times?  I’d like to know what the community thinks beyond the fact that it saves your disc drive from taking a beating.

Coming NXE Report – Netflix