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There are two kinds of speed that are relevant here:
Throughput, measured in bits per second: how fast information can be streamed off the disc. A blu-ray can stream enough data for a 4k TV (otherwise they would be useless for watching movies…). That’s comparable to the throughput of a hard disk drive. It’s not as fast as a flash drive but still pretty good.
Seek time, measured in milliseconds: how long it takes to begin reading data from a different spot on the disc. A blu-ray works similar to a vinyl record: there’s an arm that moves inward/outward and can read data etched into the disc. The arm needs to move, then it needs to wait for the right part of the disc to spin around. The seek time doesn’t matter for watching movies or installing software, because the data is being read in order. For playing a game, where the player makes choices that affect what information might be needed next, seek time is crucial. The seek time for a Blu ray is around 100 ms. For a hard drive it’s around 8ms (the discs are smaller and spin faster). For a flash drive, it is basically 0 (no spinning disc).
100ms doesn’t hold much intuitive meaning for most people. Just picture how slow a Blu ray player is to respond whenever you press a button that jumps to a different screen or part of a movie, and imagine injecting that into your gameplay.
For some games, the core gameplay engine loads into memory, then the game loads on area at a time. There’s only a seek when the player transitions into a new area. This strategy stopped working well as games became larger and more detailed (a single area can no longer be held in short-term memory). It also stopped working with the transition to open-world games. Making a game that’s partly read from disc requires extra effort, so once there was market acceptance, no one bothers to make games that way anymore.
Cartridge games have little or no installation because there’s no spinning disc to cripple the seek time. The throughput varies depending on the technology.
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