As Xbox 360 gamers who've updated to NXE would know, copying games to the hard drive is now possible. Playing from the hard drive has two main appeals: it doesn't scratch discs (you know it), and potentially faster load times.

So the question now is, is copying games to the HDD really worth the trouble?

Eurogamer undertook the challenge of copying games to their Xbox 360s and comparing HDD play to DVD play to answer this question. It must have been terribly boring, but it seems the results are worth it. For the tests they used an Xbox 360 Elite, and a range of top 10 games.

The results show that loading from the hard drive is certainly faster, but only for certain games, and only for certain sections. For The Orange Box for example, loading Half-Life 2 from the DVD took 44.5 seconds, while HDD loading took only 25.5.

On the other hand, some games like Gears of War 2, which have been optimized to run from the DVD, hardly have any changes at all. The most they shaved off for GoW2 was eight seconds from the initial loading time. The same goes for Grand Theft Auto IV - HDD loading took off only 13.5 seconds from initial loading.

So what's the verdict? It depends on how you interpret the data. Playing from the HDD is beneficial if extra seconds of load time is essential for you, especially for games whose load time between mediums are significantly far apart. You can check out their entire data set after the source link below.