A quick test I did showed that my DVD drive could read CDs at around 5mb/sec, DVDs at around 15mb/sec, while my hard drive could read at around 70mb/sec. Faster reading speed, means faster load times, simple as that.
It's quite possible today to make a game run directly of a CD/DVD on a computer (wind,linux,osx), the only difference between it and your hard drive is that you can't write to it. The only thing you would need to save to your drive are high scores, save games etc. Though in theory you could upload these to a web server, so you wouldn't need to save anything locally. |