So, a mammoth 42 minutes in total for us then - a new record, in fact. Digital Foundry readers with particularly excellent memories will recall our PS3 Slim review, where our split-screen comparison time-lapse revealed that the newer PS3 model installed the infamous Devil May Cry 4 a hell of a lot faster than our older model. It's safe to say that you'll see exactly the same thing with GT5.
We took a peek at our PS3's hard drive and found that the game selectively de-archives data from a mammoth 12GB volume on the BD, and extracts a multitude of tiny, individual files and stores them on the hard drive. This involves a remarkable amount of movement for the head on the drive, and on an HDD as old our launch model's, this causes a significant amount of seek time.
If you're running an older machine, now might be the time to pick up a replacement - 640GB is the price-per-gig sweet spot at the moment. Higher-density platters, probably more onboard cache - it should speed up your system significantly, not to mention providing a vast amount of additional storage.
