13gig drive in a 360?

SB118 · 2 Jan 2008 at 12:31

Just been nosing aorund as to what was using my precious drive space and one of the options was to format the drive, to 13ish gig.

WTF? i know a 20 gig drive formats down a bit, but wha? Or do they forget to mention that the xbox OS uses 7 gig or something?

KennyBhoy · 2 Jan 2008 at 12:34

Yeah the system files do take up a bit

SB118 · 2 Jan 2008 at 12:45

Didn't know the 360 ran vista

Fubsy · 2 Jan 2008 at 12:46

But why doesn't the Core/Arcade version need that much space? That doesn't even have a HDD for the OS...

PiKe · 2 Jan 2008 at 12:54

Because some space is reserved for caching.

SB118 · 2 Jan 2008 at 12:54

Another daft question, why can't you fit you'r own drive into ti? Have they nobbled the drive bios again or something?

KennyBhoy · 2 Jan 2008 at 12:56

Q: Why is the hard drive showing only 13Gb of free space?

A: The size of the Xbox 360 hard drive is 20 GB. Of this amount, approximately 4 GB is reserved for game title caching and other hard drive specific elements in games that support the hard drive. An additional 2 GB is reserved for use by the Xbox 360 backward compatibility software. This leaves you with almost 14 GB of free space (rounded down to 13 GB) to save game files, downloadable content and music, and other media. For more information on this, see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911593

rp2000 · 2 Jan 2008 at 12:56

Answer above beat me to it.

I am sceptical about the title caching as if that was the case how come there is no mention on the game boxes or does not inconvenience non HDD users? I personally suspect the whole 7GB is for the BC software.

rp2000

PiKe · 2 Jan 2008 at 12:58

SB118 said:
Another daft question, why can't you fit you'r own drive into ti? Have they nobbled the drive bios again or something?

Custom drive firmware.

Kreeeee · 2 Jan 2008 at 13:01

rp2000 said:
Answer above beat me to it.

I am sceptical about the title caching as if that was the case how come there is no mention on the game boxes or does not inconvenience non HDD users? I personally suspect the whole 7GB is for the BC software.

rp2000

It's reserved in case future games need it.

PiKe · 2 Jan 2008 at 13:03

rp2000 said:
Answer above beat me to it.

I am sceptical about the title caching as if that was the case how come there is no mention on the game boxes or does not inconvenience non HDD users? I personally suspect the whole 7GB is for the BC software.

rp2000

Because Core's/Arcade's will just load all the content each boot, whereas consoles with Hard Drives can simultaneously load from both dvd and hdd, decreasing load times.

KennyBhoy · 2 Jan 2008 at 13:05

Only game i've known to mention caching is Oblivion.....Obviously an option should developers decide to use it......I thought Mass Effect could have done with it (maybe it does?) , the delays in some textures loading is a joke

rp2000 · 2 Jan 2008 at 13:05

PiKe said:
Because Core's/Arcade's will just load all the content each boot, whereas consoles with Hard Drives can simultaneously load from both dvd and hdd, decreasing load times.

No.

Kreeeee said:
It's reserved in case future games need it.

This is what I meant. At present I believe only 2 games have used this space. In my opinion it would have been better if they released the 4gb space (disc caching) and allowed this to be created first time you play the game. (I would prefer if they allowed this for the BC games as well, but then they would have to allow you to download a 2GB ISO to install it etc).

rp2000

PiKe · 2 Jan 2008 at 13:09

What do you mean "No."? What I said is true.

Wrathamon · 2 Jan 2008 at 13:12

SB118 said:
WTF? i know a 20 gig drive formats down a bit, but wha? Or do they forget to mention that the xbox OS uses 7 gig or something?

Fubar said:
But why doesn't the Core/Arcade version need that much space? That doesn't even have a HDD for the OS...

The 360 OS (The kernal and dashboard) are stored in Flash ROM.

rp2000 · 2 Jan 2008 at 13:12

PiKe said:
What do you mean "No."? What I said is true.

I mean't "not what I meant".

rp2000

SB118 · 2 Jan 2008 at 13:28

Wrathamon said:
The 360 OS (The kernal and dashboard) are stored in Flash ROM.

Ahh, so you'd get more space buying a basic system, then getting the 20gig drive separately. Awesome marketing.

edit, nope, i misread that, the OS is already in the machine, just booted mine without the drive and the only things missing were my usernames, savegames and demos.

Wrathamon · 2 Jan 2008 at 13:30

SB118 said:
Ahh, so you'd get more space buying a basic system, then getting the 20gig drive separately. Awesome marketing.

No. The OS is in Flash on all the xboxes, the archetecture is the same no matter what 'model' it is ... core, pro, elite as the internals are the same identical motherboard.

When you buy a seperate HD - either the 20 or 120gb, it still has the 7gb reserved for caching and backwards compatiblity (on the emulation side, the actual xbox emulator code is very small - megabytes - but it needs space reserved to act as the HD in the original xbox - both for caching and storing downloads for original xbox games - Halo 2 levels as an example etc)

PiKe · 2 Jan 2008 at 16:17

The OS is only like 12meg or something small.

Fubsy · 2 Jan 2008 at 18:04

I wish they would give us the option to sacrifice backwards compatabilty (which I have no interest in at all) for more storage space for demos, videos, music etc.