Warp2Search.net » News » December 2005 » 360 hard drive - a third smaller than advertised?

Xbox 360 owners are being left puzzled by an apparent missing 7GB from their hard drives. The Xbox 360 hard drive is certainly 20GB in total, but players can never access more than 13GB of storage space - just two thirds of the stated size.

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Human_Hybrid Unregistered

#63520 Posted on: 12/06/2005 08:33 PM Just a stab in the dark but, couldn't this just be because of the file system utilized by the "OS". Example: You buy a 120 GB drive, but only 112 of it is usable. Isn't this the same thing? Or am I missing something?

Domingo Unregistered

#63521 Posted on: 12/06/2005 09:07 PM Might be true...but I've also noticed that there's a HUGE chunk that HD that's unavailable. With most commercial PC HD's, we can't use 5-10%...but this is upwards of 35%. I deleted all of the movies, demos. music, files, etc. and it's still not letting me use a solid 1/3 of the HD. Makes you wonder what the hell it's doing with that space if the machine can run fine without an HD at all.

qulup Unregistered

#63522 Posted on: 12/06/2005 10:24 PM If I'm not mistaken, the hard drive holds the virtual machine that runs Xbox games. I'm sure that takes a huge chunk.

BetrayerX Unregistered

#63524 Posted on: 12/06/2005 11:18 PM Glad to see a comprehensive view of the situation instead of the usual bashing. Back to the Xbox1, Nvidia held patents on certain key features of the video architecture. As many might remember, Nvidia and MS had some major issues at that time...one of them was a bout what was to be the DX9 definition. To make a long story short MS had his way. Now to get those parts running (on an ATI GPU), MS would have to pay royalties to NVidia, so emulating those NV calls was the way to avoid that. You can bet that the HD must be full of emulation code for each game and some empty space to probably download more if they plan to make more games compatible.

MB Member Posts: 26 Joined: 2004-05-21

#63525 Posted on: 12/07/2005 12:03 AM Were talking about 7 GB here. Even WindowsXP with all its useless crap is only like what? 1.5-3 GB? Its only a console OS with a few simple multimedia features, even if there are a few emulators in it, the biggest emulators I saw were like 5 MB in size. Come on... 7 GB?

boniek Junior Member Posts: 2 Joined: 2005-04-03

#63526 Posted on: 12/07/2005 01:05 AM Yup thats what it is. It is needed for xbox 1 compability.

Domingo Unregistered

#63528 Posted on: 12/07/2005 01:40 AM That's what I was thinking. Emulator or not. 7GB is larger than any OS I've encountered. I think the sheer size of that is lost on us because we're used to drives that carry so much more these days. That's an absolute ton of space that's being lost somewhere. I don't have an issue with it, but I think it's lame that they marketed it as a 20GB drive when it's not really even close.

Cimlite Junior Member Posts: 6 Joined: 2005-11-12

#63529 Posted on: 12/07/2005 02:36 AM You guys do realize that even 12gb can probably hold 10 saves for every game ever released for the Xbox360 until the day it dies. ... and you could still drop a ton of music on there as well. As for where the space went? Well... probably some of it was reseved for downloadable Live content and some for future game support, MMO-type games. That combined with the fact that you just loose space on drives could probably rack up a lot of space. Either way, this is whining about something completly pointless. The harddrive will fulfill it's purpose, 12gb or 20gb.

Dr_Colossus Unregistered

#63532 Posted on: 12/07/2005 05:14 AM Xbox 360 games including backwards compatible games need space for cacheing. 2.0GB (10%) for file system/classic 20,000,000 byte HDD scam. 2.1GB for Xbox 1 game cache compatibility. ~2GB for Xbox 360 game cache compatibility. 1 GB unacconted for.

MB Member Posts: 26 Joined: 2004-05-21

#63533 Posted on: 12/07/2005 08:14 AM Cache that stays on the Xbox even when you quit the game? What if you play a few game and then never again? You can never delete all that crap? Or is it just reserved? What if people dont want to play any Xbox1 games on the 360 (because they have the old one still or dont have any Xbox at all)?

MB Member Posts: 26 Joined: 2004-05-21

#63535 Posted on: 12/07/2005 08:16 AM Its not. It was advertised as 20 GB. And then you only get 13 GB? I have 20+ GB alone in music. And 7 GB less would mean a lot less music on it.

boniek Junior Member Posts: 2 Joined: 2005-04-03

#63537 Posted on: 12/07/2005 02:33 PM If you dont like it the way it is now wait ofr modchip. You will be probably able to do anything with your console then.

Domingo Unregistered

#63539 Posted on: 12/07/2005 06:40 PM You'd also think with that kind of cache it could run Ninja Gaiden without slowing down to an unplayable level for almost 1/2 of the game... Different chipset or not, it's "300 times more powerful than an original XBox" according to MS. If an emulator were properly designed, you'd think it could use that exponential power and gigs of cache a little better. I love the 360's native games and arcade...but Xbox 1 support is pretty shaky and that damned harddrive should be bigger and better for what they're charging for it.

Jaybo Unregistered

#63542 Posted on: 12/08/2005 05:05 AM It is 20 gigs. They never said it had 20 gigs of available space to you. If it is such a huge concern then buy another hard drive.

Jaybo Unregistered

#63543 Posted on: 12/08/2005 05:09 AM You are incorrect. The drive is 20 gigs. Period. Now, show me where anyone said you would get 20 gigs of available empty space for you to use to copy your Britney Spears songs onto...

KNIGHT Junior Member Posts: 1 Joined: 2007-08-13

#63544 Posted on: 12/08/2005 10:14 AM Human_Hybrid, the reason why a 120 GB HDD will seem smaller than its advertised size is because the marketers of your HDD use a decimal system to determine what to write on the packaging and the makers of the OS think of data storage capacity in binary code. To the HDD companies, 1 GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes using the decimal system. To the OS, 1 GB is 1,073,741,824 bytes (1048576 Kilobytes or 1024 Megabytes) using the binary code. Using binary code, your 120,000,000,000 byte HDD is actually 111.758708953857421875 GB. Really, which would you buy? A HDD that says it's 120 GB or a HDD that says it's 111.76 GB? Most people will go for the 120 GB, though they are the same size. Domingo, the reason that's the case, on a lot of new PCs, is because some OEMs will have a hidden partition that is used to save an image of the HDD incase you need to restore. Often times they will include a restore disc, but the restored image is much bigger than what could be actually stored on the CD. Thus the need for a hidden partition that would include the rest of the image not on the restore CD. HP and Compaq are notorious for this. Just use Partition magic to delete the hidden partition. Just make sure you have a full retail or OEM copy of Windows before you do this, because your restore disc will be useless.

MB Member Posts: 26 Joined: 2004-05-21

#63545 Posted on: 12/08/2005 11:03 AM Oh so if I follow your awesome logic then I shouldnt be angry if I buy a HP, Dell or Compaq PC with a 120 GB HD but then notice it has 40 GB full of crap you dont need which wasnt mentioned anywhere and you cant deinstall it or you will loose warranty or the PC will stop working? ooooohhhhhh kaaaaaaaaaaaaay

Chrisy Unregistered

#63546 Posted on: 12/08/2005 11:17 AM I was waiting for someone to post that, I couldn't be bothered to type it out

Jaybo Unregistered

#63561 Posted on: 12/09/2005 08:07 AM Actually yeah, if a person is stupid enough to buy a pre-built PC like the ones you mentioned you certainly will find alot of crap taking up space on the drive. Open foot, insert mouth?

Warp2Search.net » News » December 2005 » 360 hard drive - a third smaller than advertised?