Pre-Order Info/Help - PS4/XO

[BoardBonobo]

Well, the 500 GB drive should hold at least 10 games and I doubt I'll have more than that on the go at any one time...

But it's not going to last long with Digital Media (Films, TV, Music, Video), DLC, Digital Only games, and all the extra stuff that the OS will needlessly fill the HD with.

I seriously hope they allow all media to be stored externally and that there is a sensible limit on the external drive size.

 

[mrcorbo]

I know but I did hear you could use external drives for running games from, similar to how you can do it on the 360 now (but unfortunately are limited to 16GB, or at least were last time I tried).

This is correct.

External hard drives are supported and can be used for everything that the internal drive can be used for.

4TB USB 3.0 hard drives run ~ $170.00, while 2.5" internal drives max out at 1TB and cost $90-$100 FWIW.

 

[upnorthsox]

You sure its not a proprietary external drive?

 

[mrcorbo]

You sure its not a proprietary external drive?

Nope. As far as I've seen it hasn't been specified. Make if that what you will.

 

[BoardBonobo]

This is correct.

External hard drives are supported and can be used for everything that the internal drive can be used for.

4TB USB 3.0 hard drives run ~ $170.00, while 2.5" internal drives max out at 1TB and cost $90-$100 FWIW.

But that is just asking for trouble. Unless they are using some weird grey tech from Area 51 to protect their software from being compromised or code from being injected into the system.

 

[ERP]

Nope. As far as I've seen it hasn't been specified. Make if that what you will.

Didn't they specify USB3 explicitly, which certainly isn't proprietary

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Format the HDD to a proprietary disk format and encrypt the communications using a per-console hardware key. That stops people selling HDDs of content or snooping ports.

 

[Gradthrawn]

Didn't they specify USB3 explicitly, which certainly isn't proprietary

Yes, they did specify USB3 explicitly, and no, I think it's pretty well confirmed to be non proprietary and open to the same use as the internal drive (very pro consumer approach in that regard, IMO). However, there's nothing preventing a proprietary USB 3 drive anymore then there is preventing a proprietary SATA drive. But now that I think about it, I suspect that wasn't your point and you were specifically talking about the interface and not what the OS would accept as readable. Nevermind then, carry on.

 

[mrcorbo]

But that is just asking for trouble. Unless they are using some weird grey tech from Area 51 to protect their software from being compromised or code from being injected into the system.

Format the HDD to a proprietary disk format and encrypt the communications using a per-console hardware key. That stops people selling HDDs of content or snooping ports.

What he said. There's nothing about external drives that makes them inherently less secure than internal ones. One can quite easily take the PS3 and 360 hard drives out of their system/enclosure and hook them up to a PC and you can even back up the and restore the contents of 360 storage devices to/from a PC. This didn't create any problems.

 

[mrcorbo]

Didn't they specify USB3 explicitly, which certainly isn't proprietary

Yes, they did specify USB3 explicitly, and no, I think it's pretty well confirmed to be non proprietary and open to the same use as the internal drive (very pro consumer approach in that regard, IMO). However, there's nothing preventing a proprietary USB 3 drive anymore then there is preventing a proprietary SATA drive. But now that I think about it, I suspect that wasn't your point and you were specifically talking about the interface and not what the OS would accept as readable. Nevermind then, carry on.

What he said.

 

[BoardBonobo]

What he said. There's nothing about external drives that makes them inherently less secure than internal ones. One can quite easily take the PS3 and 360 hard drives out of their system/enclosure and hook them up to a PC and you can even back up the and restore the contents of 360 storage devices to/from a PC. This didn't create any problems.

It's not the drive I would worry about. It's the fact that the communication is through vanilla USB.

 

[dobwal]

It's not the drive I would worry about. It's the fact that the communication is through vanilla USB.

Why?

 

[ERP]

Unlike earlier USB interfaces, USB3 is actually a very good HDD interface.
With Win8's SCSI over USB implementation you can very easily saturate even a fast HDD over the interface.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's not the drive I would worry about. It's the fact that the communication is through vanilla USB.

If the information is encrypted to a per-console key, it'll be secure.

 

[BoardBonobo]

Why?

USB doesn't have the greatest track record when it comes to remaining secure, and MS have always seemed to have an issue with keeping it secure. Though Apple and Oracle lead the pack with USB issues.

 

[BoardBonobo]

Unlike earlier USB interfaces, USB3 is actually a very good HDD interface.
With Win8's SCSI over USB implementation you can very easily saturate even a fast HDD over the interface.

I'm getting a better read rate on an external USB3 HDD than I do from my internal HDD. The best is booting from a 64GB USB stick. Who needs an SSD!

 

[dagamer]

My guess is that they'll require USB 3.0 and do performance testing to make sure it's not worse than an internal drive would be. No USB 2.0 drives allowed. ~30MB/sec would just be painful when developers have 5GB of RAM to play with.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

USB doesn't have the greatest track record when it comes to remaining secure, and MS have always seemed to have an issue with keeping it secure. Though Apple and Oracle lead the pack with USB issues.

Security isn't an issue since digital downloads will be registered to your account. If your account doesn't have the rights to play the game it doesn't matter if a copy is on the external drive or not.

And for physical disks, you can no longer play without the disk. Shame as the intended method of using physical disks as just distribution medium and not ownership verification was so much more convenient.

Either way, there isn't a way to compromise external drive game security without compromising the Xbox One's OS.

As for injecting code. I'd be very surprised if MS didn't have some sophisticated HASH check for application files in order to verify that they haven't been tampered with. Since everything that runs on the machine has to be explicitly allowed by MS then it should be relatively simple for them to do that. And with the ample amount of memory and HDD space, then storing the HASHs for immediate access shouldn't be a problem. Unlike say X360 where you really didn't want to use more memory than you had to.

Again, as long as the system itself isn't compromised then security on the USB drive isn't that big of a deal. Unlike something like a PC which is hard to secure due to the ability to run arbitrary code.

Regards,
SB

 

[BRiT]

No need for hashes of any sort when the EXEs/VHDs will likely be signed. The hackers would need to know the private signing key to inject anything into the code or to tamper with it.

 

[itsmydamnation]

No need for hashes of any sort when the EXEs/VHDs will likely be signed. The hackers would need to know the private signing key to inject anything into the code or to tamper with it.

only because the signing contains a hash