Why You‘ll Be Waiting Awhile When Installing PS5 Games from Disc

Popping the latest AAA PS5 release into your console‘s disc drive used to cue up some quick installation, then nearly instant gaming gratification. Those days are gone. Modern blockbuster installs require slowly slogging through dozens of gigabytes, across various drives, only to be met with lengthy day-one patching before finally gaining access. It‘s a tedious process seemingly at odds with the PS5‘s exceptional SSD speeds. What gives? There are reasons these disc-based installs take their sweet time despite mighty hardware.

Massive File Sizes Mandated by High-Fidelity Assets

PS5 game discs don‘t merely contain the install payload itself. Entire games get packaged onto 50GB BluRays, spanning single or even double-layer discs. For example, Sackboy: A Big Adventure weighs in at a husky 44.19 GB while Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War demands a staggering 133GB. As the following table shows, many popular titles old and new require installing up to 100GB+ from the disc before touching the internet:

These ballooning capacities simply reflect gaming‘s exponential march to higher resolutions, richer details, and movie-like cinematics. Whereas early 3D titles managed complex worlds in under 1GB, 4K textures and cutscenes bloat filesizes 10x bigger or more. Reading such ginormous files imposes a fixed cost. Given the PS5‘s 2x BluRay speed, copying a 50GB game still takes over 20 minutes before patching or writing final data.

Transferring Massive Amounts of Data Bottlenecks Installs

On previous PlayStations, games ran directly off optical discs with only patch data hitting internal hard drives. Seeking faster load times, the PS5 copies the entire contents of game discs onto its blazing fast 825 GB SSD storage. This enables uncompromising throughput benefiting players after installation. It‘s a wise tradeoff…except for the copying itself introducing delays.

To illustrate using hypothetical math:

• PS5 BluRay drive: 36 MB/s read speed
• PS5 SSD drive: 5,500 MB/s write speed

Transferring a 50GB title:

• Disc read time: 50,000 MB / 36 MB/s = ~23 minutes
• SSD write time: 50,000 MB / 5,500 MB/s = ~1 minute

Clearly the SSD outpaces the disc drive. But reads remain slower than writes, dragging out installs transformer-style while the BluRay churns away. The excitement of experiencing PS5‘s ultra-responsive loads gets put on hold during this mandatory data shuffle before ever leaving disc.

Post-Launch Patches Further Inflate Installation Times

Game developers rarely ship "gold" code equivalent to discs pressed before release. Instead, teams scramble to fix bugs and optimize stability right up until launch day. Rather than reissue recall corrected discs at tremendous expense, this additional work gets bundled into "day one patches." As with base installs, these too continue ballooning:

• Spiderman PS4: 600MB update
• God of War PS4: 1.3GB update
• Last of Us Part II PS5: over 10GB update!

While patches improve gaming post-install, their download introduces additional waits pre-gaming. Some titles even awkwardly prevent launch without updates, holding fun hostage until internet catches up. Here your specific broadband speed further impacts overall wait times getting games primed.

External Factors Like Fragmentation Add Insult to Injury

Looking at stacked install steps already explains the duration. But tangential factors like system fragmentation, background tasks, user behavior and hardware can nudge times longer still:

• Heavily filled SSD drives spread data around, slowing writes
• Browsers, firmware checks hit system resources in background
• Rest mode‘s background saving/uploading steals disc access
• Fancy SSD heat sinks in premium consoles may throttle
• Faulty WiFi/Bluetooth/USB chips or drivers glitch processes

Consider these friction points icing on the cake. Such gremlins are secondary to core steps already outlined. But they contribute to the impression modern AAA games require non-trivial install effort versus casually playable cartridges of yore.

Next-generation gaming‘s fusion of high capacities and ultra performance produces amazing immersive worlds – when you finally boot them. But fist comes an endurance test in patience from purchase to playtime. Beyond picking smaller indie titles, here are tips making AAA installs feel less interminable:

• Use wired Ethernet over WiFi to accelerate downloads
• Set console to rest mode for background processing
• Close other apps when installing to maximize throughput
• Reboot router/console before starting for cleanest slate
• Transfer between external SSD rather than HDD

While bang-for-buck impresses once running, storage and internet still gatekeep. Short of revolutionizing media or broadband, players simply wait as game files grow larger than ever at each generation’s dawn.