I've been playing around with benchmarks for my SSD and hard drive arrays, and have starting testing the time it takes for certain games to patch.

For example, I take a fresh installed Company of Heroes game and time how long each patch takes to complete on my different hard drive setups. What makes this confusing for me is that a 100MB patch might take 5 mintues or more depending on the hardware and patch.

Does anyone know what's involved with patches like these, and whats happening on the data level? For example, when I patch a game like COH, what happens...is it something simple like this?

1. Patch is expanded and copied to temp location
2. Files in game directory are copied over
3. registry updated
4. Done


Anyone know?