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I don't have the fastest internet connection but downloads from steam sit happily at 30MB/s so in an hour I can download 108GB of data.

The earliest cdroms that I remember were 1x drives - so it took an hour to read that 700MB. Obviously drive speeds increased tremendously over the lifespan of cdrom (did it reach 48x?), but compared to the earliest generation it is about the same.

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The limiting factor of the CD/DVD drives was seek time, not read speed. Seeking a spot on the disk was on the order of 150ms. You basically got 5-7 read OPS. The best drive I remember stood out at 120ms seek, some would be over 200ms seek. Sometimes this was a hard number to track down. Even with a 48x drive, installation could easily still take 30+ minutes particularly if the installer wasn't optimized for sequential read off a flat file.

Sometimes you got a really bad installer, and it could take a pretty grueling 2+ hours. Some companies chose to optimize for space (thus cost..) rather than user experience.

As space got more plentiful it would sometimes be easier to copy the disk and remount it and then install.

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