Originally Posted by
Josh
Duplicating data on the disk has been a common practice for a while to help reduce on load times. The 360 does it as well. Developers aren't compressing because why should they take the time to? It lowers the quality of the final product, or even in the case of lossless compression, takes CPU cycles to decompress which means the game isn't running at it's optimal rate.
Since many game engines are starting to stream data as it is needed, load times aren't going to be as much of a problem as one would think. Since the PS3 also has the HDD on all consoles, a small amount of space could be used as a temporary cache which could be loading from the disk while nothing new is being loaded.