NCAA Football 10 Hard Drive Evaluation

Continuing the series of 360 hard drive performance evaluations this time brings about NCAA Football 10. I’ve gone through and compared several aspects of the game based on loading times. The NCAA Football series has been especially plagued by long loading times, laggy menus, and tedious menu navigation so the hope would be this could cut down on some of that. As always the other benefits of installing to the hard drive such quieter running and less stress on the 360 remain.

Install time- 8:59
Install size- 6.2 GB

Loading Times
Boot to main menu- 52 seconds disc vs 39 seconds HDD (13 seconds)
Boot into “Play Now” game- 31 seconds disc vs 13 seconds HDD (18 seconds)
Boot out of “Play Now” to main menu- 22 seconds disc vs 11 seconds HDD (11 seconds)
Boot into “Play Now” game with one Teambuilder- 38 seconds disc vs 22 seconds HDD (16 seconds)
Boot into “Play Now” game with two Teambuilder- 50 seconds disc vs 27 seconds HDD (23 seconds)

This is by far the most significant difference in loading times seen to date. It’s great to be able to shave all that time off but hopefully next year the NCAA team looks at how to cut down on loading times because it remains an annoyance and probably the worst of the main crop of sports titles.