Hard drive is used for caching to reduce load times, right ??

The hard drive in a PC is used for installation and caching in order to reduce load times right ??

The ps3 has a hard drive for installation and caching but the load times are slower (even slower than 360) for some games like the Orange Box. Why is that ??

Hard drive for caching? Where did you read that?

The hard drive in a PC is nothing but a large data storage, like a warehouse for a business. It's used to store the data files of the game (in case you didn't know, the game doesn't run off of the disc), which is then partially loaded to the RAM for high speed use (because data is accessed by the CPU and GPU from RAM).

The hard drive is used for caching on a PS3 because reading off blu-rays(and dvds for that matter) is slow. So for to answer your topic question for the PS3, then yes.
However, PCs don't read game data off discs while playing the game, if it requires the disc to be in then it is because of copyright protection. So PCs don't use hard drives to cache to reduce load times in games.

The load times are poor on the PS3 orange box due to the developers not implementing the hard drive usage well. My guess is that it is reading off the disc, hence long load times.

[QUOTE="Wesker776"]

Hard drive for caching? Where did you read that?

---n00b_kid---

Go back and play your Gamecube and DS games.

...and the problem with the Gamecube and DS is...? :roll:

Go back to system wars and take your piss poor attitude with you too.

Hard drives are used primarily for the storage of data and programs. On PCs, the game data is loaded onto the harddrive from CD or DVD for faster access times, because CD and DVD are slow in comparison.

And about caching, that depends on the terms used. World of Warcraft caches data onto the hard drive, but this data is object data used to reduce internet usage when loading players onto your PC. If the character data is not there or has some updates, the data is downloaded from server. This is the same type of cache that web browsers use.

Then there is virtual RAM. Hard drives can be used as expanded RAM, although extremely slow in comparison. The purpose is to offload less used data that is stored in RAM to virtual RAM, making more space in system RAM for data that will be used more often. When the data that is cached to virtual RAM is requested, the page of data, a predetermined size of RAM data, is swapped with a page of data in system RAM. This is an old technique used when RAM was at most 1 MB and the software needs more. It is still used today.

As far as consoles doing it, when they can. The Xbox had built-in functions to load commonly used data from the game disc to the hard drive for faster access, what your question is asking. Some PS3 games actually install data onto the hard drive, Ratchet and Clank for example, but I believe that caching feature, which is on the XBox at least, must be programmed by the developers of the game. I can say the X360 has the same caching abilities the XBox has, but I can't prove it.