Xbox 360 hard drive.

[Dr. Nick]

Please could some one tell me how the Xbox 360 hard drive is partitioned? When I say that I mean how much space on the hard drive is for the gamer to use for their personal stuff like music and saves? How much space does Microsoft use for BC, Dashboard, Xbox Live, and other Xbox360 hardware related software? How much space is left for the devs to use for their stuff like caching their games to the hard drive?

 

[Hardknock]

2 gigs is reserved for cacheing. I'm not sure of anything else...

 

[creon100]

Well, according to some people in Canada who won their consoles from some contest and have them already, the console comes with 2GB of extra content on the drive (this is not the 2GB reserved for caching), and the backward compatibility software takes up about 7GB of space on the harddrive. I'd imagine this is all on the user partition though and can be deleted if desired (though I'd hope there's a recovery disc to reload the backwards compatibility stuff if you delete and later decide you'd like it back).

 

[drpepper]

Well, according to some people in Canada who won their consoles from some contest and have them already,

What contest is this? I haven't heard of anything. Or at least you'd think the winners would be announced at a time that's more inline with the product release.

 

[creon100]

It's the BeFirstToPlay contest - or something like that.

 

[jvd]

Well, according to some people in Canada who won their consoles from some contest and have them already, the console comes with 2GB of extra content on the drive (this is not the 2GB reserved for caching), and the backward compatibility software takes up about 7GB of space on the harddrive. I'd imagine this is all on the user partition though and can be deleted if desired (though I'd hope there's a recovery disc to reload the backwards compatibility stuff if you delete and later decide you'd like it back).

7gbs for bc ? I find that highly doubtfull esp with only 210 games .

 

[scooby_dooby]

maybe 0.7 GB! and that's with all 200games loaded up. Something I didn't think they were doing....

 

[creon100]

No, they're saying that when they try to do a reformat of the harddrive they're being told explicitly that they're reformating for only 13GB. This would indicate that a) the BC software is not deletable (and they haven't yet mentioned any recovery disk being shipped with it), b) the extra content is deletable (but not recoverable), c) it's odd that it says you're reformating for 13GB when it's going to reserve 2GB of those for caching (unless I'm wrong on the caching). So it tells you you're reformating 13GB, but only 11GB of that would be useful.

 

[Titanio]

Only Halo and Halo2 are patched out of the box, apparently. You download the rest. If the emulator is taking 7GB out of the box, that's surprising. Although maybe that has something to do with ALWAYS having to have a certain minimum amount of space reserved for those Xbox games that used the hard disk.

Only 11GB free out of 20GB seems harsh though.

 

[scooby_dooby]

XBOX1 only had 1GB available for cache(3x ~300mb partitions IIRC) so the stock 2GB should be fine.

I can't believe the emulator takes up 7GB, that would be mind boggling, and pretty damn lame, especially since I don't give a rats ass about BC.

 

[creon100]

But if the harddrive is already reserving cache space for 360 games, surely the emulator can use that same space when it's running an old Xbox game and wouldn't require its own reserved space. I'm starting to think the theory of the space containing a ton of recompiled executables for all the supported games might hold water.

 

[BlueTsunami]

Yeah, i'm in that thread about BC taking up 7GB woth of HDD space. It seems as though one of the users tried Formating the HDD and it still only gave him 13GB usable HDD space. So basically Xbox360 Emulation Software (whatever its composed of) takes 7GB worth of HDD space, 2GB for caching so you whould have around 11GB of HDD space to work with.

 

[Dr. Nick]

Are you guys positive that the caching doesn't take place within the 7Gb you are talking about?

 

[Titanio]

I thought it was 2GB for the preloaded content? Or is that another 2GB?

 

[AzBat]

I'd like to see the source who says it's using 7GB of space. That's seems totally wrong. Microsoft has already confirmed the initial BC out of the box only supports Halo and Halo2 and it's an early version at that. The full version will be able to fit on a burned CD downloadable off Microsoft's site. I doubt very seriously it's larger than 1GB.

Tommy McClain

 

[BlueTsunami]

I'd like to see the source who says it's using 7GB of space. That's seems totally wrong. Microsoft has already confirmed the initial BC out of the box only supports Halo and Halo2 and it's an early version at that. The full version will be able to fit on a burned CD downloadable off Microsoft's site. I doubt very seriously it's larger than 1GB.

Tommy McClain

Only Halo and Halo2? Theres like 200 more games.

 

[creon100]

Just reporting what they are telling us:

20GB HDD - 2GB preloaded content (deletable at least via reformat) - 7GB backward compatibility software = 11GB free out-of-the-box - 2GB reserved for caching = 9GB to do with as you please out-of-the-box

Deleting the preloaded content nets you 2GB more so you get 9GB + 2GB = 11GB to do with as you please out-of-the-box after deleting preloaded content, with apparently no way to get back the 7GB apparently being used for backwards compatibility.

If the 2GB of caching space is included in the 7GB reserved for the BC software than you can add 2GB back into all the results up there.

 

[jvd]

right something sounds fishy .

You sure its not just reserving 7gbs for caching ? though that sounds really high too .

 

[scooby_dooby]

Yeah, i'm in that thread about BC taking up 7GB woth of HDD space. It seems as though one of the users tried Formating the HDD and it still only gave him 13GB usable HDD space. So basically Xbox360 Emulation Software (whatever its composed of) takes 7GB worth of HDD space, 2GB for caching so you whould have around 11GB of HDD space to work with.

That's strange. MS has done some wierd stuff before, like all the later XBOX's had 10GB HDD however they only unlocked 8GB, and you actually had to have your dashboard create an extra 2GB partition on bootup to enable the extra space.

Is it possible it's 7GB 'reserved' for BC? it still makes no sense as the profiles are only supposed to be ~5mb, and that would be enough space for over 1400 games(and xbox only has ~1100 i think)

 

[hey69]

probably they made more emu software out of the box. maybe for 50games already