Xbox 360 hard drive.

[kyleb]

I can't see why they wouldn't let you use the whole thing however you want. I mean the console supposably runs fine without the thing so I'd figure the 20gb hdd would be free for whatever.

 

[Dr. Nick]

One more thing does anyone know how much hardware cache is on the drive? 2mb,4mb,8mb? I'm assuming 2mb but you never know with Microsoft. Considering the fact that the drive alone cost western consumers $100 American it possibly could have 8mb of cache but then again Microsoft might want to make the most money possible off of the drive.

 

[jvd]

I thought it was a 4meg . Not sure though


The specs were posted

 

[Guden Oden]

Then the oldest cache gets deleted, and next time you play that game you have a long first load time.

Exactly, which is why it's a dumb idea to restrict caching to three games of less than a gig each cached when the total drive capacity is 20 gigabytes. I'm not the least interested in replacing soundtracks or anything like that. Improved load times is much more important in the grand scheme of things.

Worked pretty good for the last 4 years.

Well, not implying anything, but you've got a slightly forgiving tendency in some things regarding the box/MS. Maybe that explains why you don't find that an annoyance.

For someone that rotates more often between different titles, a small number of hardcoded cache partitions isn't going to help much, the games will just keep overwriting each other.

Personally, I've no intention of ever using xbox backwards compatibility because the games don't look good enough to waste time and money on when I have a next-gen system. I could spend that time playing next-gen games instead. Hence I don't want 7GB of harddrive space locked up for BC use. Nor do I want 1.5GB, or indeed any amount whatsoever. I want that stuff gone. Hopefully I can also make it go away. If all else fails, I guess I just have to screw that silly plastic shell the drive sits in open, hook it up to my PC and zero it.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Well not sure what we're arguing about, I agree with you that I hope the BC stuff can be removed.

It looks like MS has reserved up to 6GB for cache for X360 which is pretty good, it would be cool if they had a selectable cache size and # of directories, but it's not something I'm gonna get all excited about if its not there. I would rather have the space for game saves, downloads, demo's and expansion packs anyways.

I was just saying there's no reason they should need more than 2.5GB for BC. Should we be allowed to delete it is another topic, but I would say yes. The ideal solution is to use the X360's cache directories which has been promised to developers anyways.

As far as me being forgiving, but I'm far from forgiving. I have called MS out alot in the last 6 months. I must admit I backup all games to my HDD, so load times for me are about 1/3 the normal speed, with or without cache, though I haven't heard any complaints about it, most people are just happy to have a HDD in the first place.

 

[Dr. Nick]

The hard drive, a SAMSUNG SpinPoint M40S HMO20GI, seems to be specially made or not yet on the market. I can't find the model number anywhere on google. All the other models in its class seem to have 8mb of cache.

 

[scooby_dooby]

It's suppsoed to be a Seagate LD25

 

[Dr. Nick]

I got the info I posted above from the pic Anand posted but maybe Microsoft decided to get drives from more than one manufacturer.