Apparently, the advantages of a Hard Disk installation aren’t quite an advantage for all titles. Many users have noticed a general loss in game speed after having installed Halo 3, thanks to the new functionality that appears with the New XBox Experience. So many, in fact, that it took Bungie’s Mac Noguchi to post on the team’s official forum, explaining to users that they shouldn’t install the game on the hard drive.

In fact, the third chapter of Halo was developed in order to be read from the DVD, with a big data streaming flowing through the Hard Disk, in order to optimize the loading times. This feature is disabled if the game is installed, hence the loading times are longer.

“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”, says Hoguchi in order to explain how the feature works.

Bungie doesn’t seem to have any intentions in working on a patch that could solve this issue, for now. Hence, the best advice remains to follow the instructions and leave the game on DVD, without a hard disk instalation.