I've heard conflicting opinions on this... my boyfriend installed it to his 360 and it made the game take a million years to load. Have any of the updates fixed this yet? I've had a lot of problems with the game overloading my system and crashing it, so I'm considering installing it to my hard drive. Will this fix any problems?
4 Answers
Installing it to your hard drive will make the game load faster, provided your hard drive isn't too full. It will shorten the loading times etc. It will also make the Xbox quieter while playing. If your Xbox is fully functional then it should not break.
As you can see from this link there were issues in the past where textures and load times were extended because of Skyrims heavy reliance on the Xbox 360's caching system. It would appear that a good portion of the texture issues have been patched and addressed, so if load times are your problem I would give in a whirl. Worst case scenario you can go back to the disk if you're not happy with the performance. Overall it should cut your loadtimes down though.
Keep in mind, installing to the harddrive for games you play often is usually a good idea so that you can put a little less strain on your disk drive.
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Thanks for this. I'd just really like to know if it will help lessen the strain on my machine. It seems like the more hours I put in, the more information the game needs to load at any given time, so it really does hinder the performance. I've had to restart my Xbox numerous times because of freezing. But I'll try installing it and see if the patches have helped at all.– PekkishCommented Mar 7, 2012 at 20:38
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I had installed to HDD from day one, have had about 5 hard lockups but nothing else to report that I could put down to HDD. No loading issues either (I never have more than about 10 saves going though).
HDD is faster, and since I have an older model 360 it also helps to not have something that sounds like an F16 warming up for take-off in the corner of the room.
I have the slim 4GB with Kinect and the load times for map transitions are horrible if I play from the disk. I decided to install the game on a 8GB flash drive (Kingstons data travelers in my case) and see if performance would improve. There is a HUGE improvement.
Load times went from 20 seconds down to 5-10 seconds and sometimes almost instant when loading to a house or cave. Loading a save file when you open the game still takes some time but it is way better. Also, it no longer reads from the DVD drive which means no noise at all while I play, we all know how noisy the dvd drive can be in games like Skyrim or GTA, that's mainly the reason i tried to use a USB flash drive because it was annoying me. However, it takes longer to install the game on a USB flash drive than on a hdd, i can live with that.