The Video Game Revue

PS3 Disk Usage Boggle

I had a bit of a shock today when my PS3 reported during a download that I only have 5 gigs free on it. I don't generally keep close tabs on how much disk space is left on my PS3 because a) you have to visit "System Information" under the settings menu to find out, and b) my PS3 has 40 gigs, which seems like overkill given that I only own 5 PS3 games on disc (not including another five or so downloaded games like Noby Noby Boy, Tekken 5, and Wipeout HD). A quick visit to the Game Data Utility revealed that my games have been installing a lot more data than I supposed.

For instance, Fritzkrieg brought over Fallout 3 one day and we played for about an hour, maybe two. Fallout 3 quietly installed 4 gigs of data in the background--data which has sat idle since. That's 10% of my total disk space used up without me knowing about it. Games like MGS4 and GT5: Prologue tell you when they're installing data to disc, and they aren't shy about taking up quite a lot of space (several gigs apiece).

By contrast, my Xbox 360 only has a 15 gig drive, and I own over 55 Xbox 360 games on disc (I was somewhat surprised by my tally, and that doesn't even include the roughly 20 Xbox Live arcade games that I own), but I currently have roughly 3 gigs free, and that's after using the install-to-hard-drive utility on Left 4 Dead to work around the annoying disc drive noise issue that I was complaining about earlier. It's easy for me to keep tabs on how much space is free on my Xbox because it reports the amount of free space right in several navigation menus that I see frequently, such as when I select a device to save a game to.

What freaks me out a little about this whole situation is that, at this rate, if I bought just a handful of other PS3 games, I'd run out of disk space. Presumably the system is smart enough to start uninstalling older game data at this point to make room for the new, but I still find it odd that on a home gaming console with a 40 gig drive, well over half of that could be consumed by as few as five games. I had expected space to feel very tight on the Xbox 360 and over-abundant on the PS3, but that hasn't been the case.

On a loosely related note, what's up with Empire: Total War being a whopping 15 gig install? Not only does that take quite a while to download off of Steam, but once I fired up the game, I honestly couldn't tell what all of that disk space is really being used for. Perhaps the problem is simply that I can't run it at full spec, but still... 15 gigs!

posted by Parappa @ 11:16 PM