So you downloaded the New Xbox Experience on your Xbox 360 and immediately ripped Halo 3 to your hard drive, hoping to get some almost intangible advantage over those n00bs you so desperately want to pwn.. But something's been nagging you, clawing at the back of your mind, ever since but you just don't want to admit it. Time to face facts: The game ran better off the disc! Yeah, it turns out there is no benefit to installing some Xbox 360 games to your hard drive, and Halo 3 is one of them. In fact, it's slower that way. The reason is that the game already caches maps and data to your hard drive, and apparently caching from one part of the hard drive to another is slower than simply doing it from the DVD. Bungie isn't likely to patch the game to alter this, so the game is about as good as it's going to get. Hey, at least now you can get back about 7GB of storage...
Just out of curiosity, do you know of anyone that has done a performance study on other games? I'd be interested to see which games are most likely to benefit from getting stored on the drive.
Just posted some notes I found around the 'Net.