Originally posted by Lanny
write speed to the hard drive is the same either way. I can't imagine why reading from an optical drive would be slower that net IO, like I don't really know how blueray works but if you can read off it fast enough to do HD video decoding it should probably be faster than over an internet connection. I guess I'd go with soy on this one, maybe the disk is scratched and error correction is bottle necking it?
A blue-ray drive reads/writes data at about 33Mbps. So if you pop in a physical disc to be played, the PS4 will read it, cache it to RAM and play at
theoretically up to 33Mbps. That is still enough to push HD video and audio to your favorite players for movies and whatnot. For the PS4 specifically:
The read-only optical drive reads Blu-ray discs at 6× constant angular velocity for a maximum read speed of 27 MB/s – a significant upgrade from the PS3's 2× speeds that were capped at 9 MB/s
If you downloaded your game, your game will run as an image essentially directly from the hard drive. Depending on whether or not you upgraded your hard drive with a solid state or not will depend on load times but for a stock PS4 hard drive, it will be limited to the loading capabilities of SATA3 which no spinning magnetic hard drive on the planet can take advantage of but still runs between 80-160MBPS on average.
If upgraded with an SSD, you can expect the maximum output of the SATA3 to around 500ish mbps.
The problem is absolutely with the physical bluray medium.