I think this little nugget was interesting, speaking of reducing load times:

> To minimize [rotating harddrive seek time], developers will often duplicate certain game assets in order to form contiguous data blocks, which the drive can read faster.

> "If you look at a game like Marvel's Spider-Man," Cerny says, "there are some pieces of data duplicated 400 times on the hard drive."

400 times! That's a lot. I wonder to what extent or ratio the game is simply redundancy. Likely only smaller assets are duplicated.

edit: also,

> However, game installation (which is mandatory, given the speed difference between the SSD and the optical drive)

I guess this means only a cursory disc check will be performed at game start, from then the rest will be from ssd. That'd be great.