How does XB harddrive caching work?

[Shifty Geezer]

Just wondering how game caching to HD works on XB? On a PC you have to ask it politely to turn off, and temporary data is deleted. On XB, if you're in the middle of a game that's using the HD and you switch off, how is that temporary data managed? Does power-on clear everything in a temp directory?

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

On XB, if you're in the middle of a game that's using the HD and you switch off...

Turn off your Xbox?

You'll never reap the benefits of the faulty power cords that way!

8)

 

[ERP]

Unlike PC's the XBox filesystem is robust (and as a result a lot slower), i.e. it doesn't cache writes. There is a grace period for writes to complete when the power button is pressed. However ripping out the power cord from the Xbox while it's writing will corrupt the file.

As a result applications are required to handle RW errors on the harddrive gracefully (it's part of the submission process testing). So if my app is reading from the disk and the file is corrupt it has to delete the diskfile, read it from DVD and potentially recache it.

 

[Qroach]

You hand it a cheque with a specific sum on it and say, "I'd like this cached please", and it will hand you back a number of dollar bills. Bingo! You've been cached.

oh crap someone already made a joke in this thread