The NXE dropped today. If you weren’t aware, welcome to the future. One of the big features is the ability to install full retail games to your hard drive. I’ve been using this for a couple weeks with Rock Band 2 and Gears of War 2 and love it. Not only does it speed up loading times in some cases, but it reduced the wear on your DVD drive and makes the Xbox 360 a whole lot quieter.

However, not all games are created equal. Trying to run Halo 3 from your Xbox 360 hard drive will actually increase loading times. Ouch. Here’s the quick and dirty: Halo 3 caches maps to the hard drive in the “utility partition” of the hard drive. This was used to speed loading times from the DVD. Even if you install to the hard drive, the game still goes through this caching procedure. Now here’s where it gets tricky. When playing from disc, you’re loading from both the hard drive and the DVD. When playing from the hard drive, you’re trying to read from two locations on a single source. You can only do so much from the hard drive at once, which leads to slower load times.

Don’t expect Bungie to patch Halo 3 to make it work better from the hard drive. There would be a whole lot involved and it’s just not worth their time. So, Halo players, stick with running the game from the disc. It’s not all that bad to save on the hard drive space, anyway.