Optical Disc streaming - how does it work?

Caporegime
Joined
28 Oct 2003
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Location
Chestershire
Was reading a post about Oblivion on the 360 which made me think, how do these consoles read/stream data from their optical media so smoothly? How can it play audio and read level data at the same time?

When you try and access more than one file at a time on a CD/DVD inside a Windows computer, you can hear the drive going bonkers as it moves the head back and forth accessing different parts of the disc.
 
Basically, Caching I think (in the case of consoles with hard drives) or data is layed out sequentially on the disc.
 
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