XBOX 360+GTAV: Making sure game starts from USB stick

[Salt]

Hi,

I've installed the install disk to the HDD and the play disk to a USB stick. When the game is run from HDD+USB, the console is wonderfully quiet. However, I can't seem to reliably get the game to use the USB stick every time: sometimes it uses the DVD. The only way I can reliably get the game to start from USB is to format the stick, install the play disk, and then start the game without rebooting.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

 

[cmdrdredd]

You aren't meant to install the play disk. It may work but Rockstar recommends not doing it.

 

[GoSharks]

Even if a game is installed to storage on the 360, it will still spin the disc up to verify that you are in possession of the game, and it may take a few minutes before it decides to spin down. I see this all the time with Forza4, while I have other games where the disc is already spun down by the time the menu loads.

 

[Salt]

You aren't meant to install the play disk. It may work but Rockstar recommends not doing it.

I realize this, it's just so damn tempting to try to run it from USB, since I get both the performance of DVD+HDD (as opposed to the lower performance of just HDD; which Rockstar recommends against), *and* a quiter console.

I don't know if Rockstar said explicitly that the play disk shouldn't be installed on anything, or if it was just that it shouldn't be installed on the HDD. Surely the reason is that the game needs to stream from two devices at once to pull in assets quickly enough; so I guess a USB stick should work.. But of course, Rockstar doesn't need the hassle of having to support different kinds of sticks and what have you.

Still.. It works so well when it works, that I can't really let this go just yet. ;-)

 

[Salt]

Even if a game is installed to storage on the 360, it will still spin the disc up to verify that you are in possession of the game, and it may take a few minutes before it decides to spin down. I see this all the time with Forza4, while I have other games where the disc is already spun down by the time the menu loads.

That's very true, and it does that when I run the game from HDD+USB successfully. However, when I said that it runs from DVD, it really does use the DVD all the time.

 

[Salt]

May have found a solution here: http://gtaforums.com/topic/596429-x360-usb-flash-drive-solution/?p=1063394997

Haven't tried it yet, though.

 

[Rakehellion]

I realize this, it's just so damn tempting to try to run it from USB, since I get both the performance of DVD+HDD (as opposed to the lower performance of just HDD; which Rockstar recommends against), *and* a quiter console.

I don't know if Rockstar said explicitly that the play disk shouldn't be installed on anything, or if it was just that it shouldn't be installed on the HDD. Surely the reason is that the game needs to stream from two devices at once to pull in assets quickly enough; so I guess a USB stick should work.. But of course, Rockstar doesn't need the hassle of having to support different kinds of sticks and what have you.

Still.. It works so well when it works, that I can't really let this go just yet. ;-)

Your USB stick is probably slower than a DVD drive.

 

[Salt]

Your USB stick is probably slower than a DVD drive.

What makes you think so? According to Wikipedia, the XBox DVD has a transfer speed of ~15 MB/s, and the corresponding figure for USB thumbdrives seems to be somewhere between 20 and 30 MB/s. Did I miss something? Perhaps the XBOX USB interface can't handle high speeds?

Of course, we don't know anything about how Rockstar coded their game: at what transfer rate is the game engine saturated with data, and other things become the bottleneck?

(This is a purely academic discussion for me; I'm commenting just because I find it interesting and I want to learn more - as long as the game runs good, I don't really care if the DVD is faster or not).