X-Box actually has 10 Gig hard drive inside unit!

[LiQiCE]

I remember one of the big announcements was that Microsoft was putting an 8 gig hard drive instead of a 10 gig hard drive into the X-Box. However, if you look at the various sites that have been dissecting the X-Box, you'll see all of them have a Seagate U Series 5 IDE hard drive in them. And upon inspection, the smallest Seagate hard drive that they make in the U Series 5 drives is a 10 gig hard drive! On Vans Hardware when they plugged the drive into their computer it was picked up as a 10 Gig hard drive too. Maybe what Microsoft means is that 2 gigs is reserved for the OS and data caching and 8 gigs is actually usable by the end user?

Pic of hard drive
HardOCP opens X-Box
Vans Hardware opens X-Box

Seagate U Series 5 Data Sheet

 

[ChrisIsBored]

Everything i've heard from back then til now has always been 10G hdd... not sure where you got 8 from...

Anyways, the fact that they're using those particular seagate drives scares me... we still have some left over at work from pulled servers.... they suck... period.

 

[ShadowHunter]

<< Maybe what Microsoft means is that 2 gigs is reserved for the OS and data caching and 8 gigs is actually usable by the end user? >>



That seems logical to me. I would even bet that there is a 2 gig and then an 8 gig partition.



<< Anyways, the fact that they're using those particular seagate drives scares me... we still have some left over at work from pulled servers.... they suck... period. >>



That's odd, I always thought that Seagate had a fairly good reputation....?

 

[shazbot]

actually, icrontic did the same thing, & reviewed the possibility of hacking the xbox. Their xbox however came with an 8gig 5400rpm western digital HD. It looks like the xbox come in 2 flavors, we just have to figure out how to tell the difference.

 

[Dug]

It really shouldn't make any difference- It's mainly for caching and saved games.
How many saved games would it taketo fill up 8-10gigs?

 

[shazbot]

i read somewhere that you can actually rip your music cd's to mp3 and have them on the harddrive, so you can listen to it as you play a game. 10 gigs is always better than 8 anyways =\

 

[royaldank]

<< i read somewhere that you can actually rip your music cd's to mp3 and have them on the harddrive, so you can listen to it as you play a game. 10 gigs is always better than 8 anyways =\ >>



Yeah, there are games that will allow you to swap the soundtracks for tracks you've ripped to the harddrive...however I doubt its mp3, probably WMA (but that is the same point).

However, the XBOX wont read CDRs...so don't think you are going to throw all your music CDs in there and rip them...only your orginal store bought copies...

 

[Dug]

<< However, the XBOX wont read CDRs...so don't think you are going to throw all your music CDs in there and rip them...only your orginal store bought copies... >>


It does read cdrw's though. I know because I've done it.

 

[LiQiCE]

Reading CD-Rs and CD-RWs is a sortof hit or miss thing. It not only matters what type of CD-R/CD-RW you use, but also the burning software and the options you use when burning it.

Example:

Used a Verbatim 10x CD-RW and burnt a disc with Nero v5.5.5.1 (I think thats the right version number) using Disc-At-Once, Finalize Disc, and included CD-Text on the disc, burned at 10x ... X-box couldnt read it.

Same exact Verbatim 10x CD-RW disc, same version of Nero, burned at 8x, Track-At-Once, no Finalize Disc, no CD-Text ... X-Box read it fine. So it seems as if certain options will let it read the CD... Although I couldnt get it to read CD-R discs even using Taiyo Yuden TDK Discs with the same options that let the Verbatim disc work.

 

[AmRoD]

doesn't it read BLACK BACK cd-rs or really dark ones?

 

[royaldank]

Hadn't tried using different options...thanks for the tip.

Maybe there is hope yet that I'll be able to back up my XBOX games...I'm always losing my originals and have bad luck and scratch them all to hell.

 

[LiQiCE]

I don't have any black CD-Rs to try it out but reports are that black CD-Rs do not work. I will probably try to burn a TDK original (made by TDK) with dark blue dye and see if I have any success. My existing TDK dark blue discs didn't work, but I burned them with Disc-At-Once and I'm guessing that might make a difference.

 

[RudeBoie]

<< Everything i've heard from back then til now has always been 10G hdd... not sure where you got 8 from...

Anyways, the fact that they're using those particular seagate drives scares me... we still have some left over at work from pulled servers.... they suck... period. >>



Actually, MS said that they never officially said they would be using 10G HD's. The original spec was also supposed to be 8. 10G is what I used to hear a lot, even in magazines I'm sure, so I'm not sure why they didn't correct everybody until about 6 weeks ago or so.

 

[Scarpozzi]

I would guess that they only use 2 gigs for now, but the problem is that Microsoft doesn't make hard drives. When they outsourced to get them, 2 gig hard drives are no longer in production so they bought the cheapest one they could. Not a bad deal for us end users cause you could probably swap it with a smaller one and the system wouldn't know the difference. Might be worth a try for a few gigs of free space, but wait until someone else tries it.

 

[LiQiCE]

Well from what Vans Hardware said, when they tried to put the hard drive into their computer, they couldn't get it to mount. And when they tried to get another hard drive to work in X-Box, X-Box didn't work. So until somebody can figure out how to get the X-Box to boot with a different hard drive (bigger or smaller) it looks like we're stuck with the seagate one.

 

[Keego]

They should have tried disk diagnostic tools like Delpart or partition magic, or even Ghost to see what partitions were on there. I can't believe that they used a disk yet if that disk goes bad, there's no way to restore it w/o sending it in. I bet people that will be repairing these babies will just take the disk out, reformat it in whatever way, and pop it back in...

 

Love that mobile celery chip I think my calculator has a more powerful processor

 

[Bluga]

wow

big deal.

 

[Nefrodite]

well i don't think the harddrive manufactuer will specially make drives for ms lowest storage drives just have one platter.. so maybe the size will increase with time

 

[neovan]

can you use norton ghost and put that image on a say...80GB hd...what would happen?

 

[Sugadaddy]

<< can you use norton ghost and put that image on a say...80GB hd...what would happen? >>



Ghost couldn't read the HD...



Thanks guys, I'll try CDRW or different settings in Nero to try and get them to work. The CDRs I tried didn't work... (and I haven't bought a CD for like 2 years )



BTW, does anybody know how much space the HD has in Xbox units. Mine still says the HD is 50,000+ with 50,000+ available...

 

[LiQiCE]

Sugadaddy,

I'm guessing that the X-Box can only estimate available memory blocks up to 50,000, thats why you can keep saving stuff onto the hard drive and it always says "50,000+ memory blocks free" ... With 8 Meg memory cards being the norm, I'd assume when you get to gigs free that the X-Box doesnt even bother calculating how many blocks it has free.

 

[Sugadaddy]

<< Sugadaddy,

I'm guessing that the X-Box can only estimate available memory blocks up to 50,000, thats why you can keep saving stuff onto the hard drive and it always says "50,000+ memory blocks free" ... With 8 Meg memory cards being the norm, I'd assume when you get to gigs free that the X-Box doesnt even bother calculating how many blocks it has free. >>




yeah, I'm just curious to know how much more than 50,000 it has...


Do you know how many blocks an 8MB memory card has?

 

[LiQiCE]

No idea on the 8MB memory card, I didn't buy one ... Maybe someone else knows?

 

[royaldank]

I would assume that they only had the thing calculate 50000+ because of the HD sizes. As reported here, there are different HDs in different systems. They were probably assuming that in the future, the HD might vary in size due to shortages/overages and price fluctuation.

My guess is that there isn't really a sure fire way to know how much is left...especially considering you don't know if its an 8 or 10 gig drive.