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Xbox 360 USB storage support now live

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purbeast0 said:
just for speed reasons?

how big do flash drives get now a days?

I kind of want some type of USB drive for a few reasons.

1. Putting Xbox 360 installs to it.
2. Putting video files on it to play on my 360/PS3 (can always stream it but this way its a little more portable)
3. Having Time Machine backups of my OSX install since it's a Hackintosh and who knows if something will crap out, and it's going to have the iPod apps I write on the HDD.

I just assumed get one of those portable HDDs.
Click to expand...

Oh, if you're doing all that other stuff than you're probably better off with a HDD. I was suggesting a flash drive solely for portability. Since they limit the space for the USB drives to 16GB not much point of using a HDD if you're only using it for game saves and installs.
 
purbeast0 said:
i need to get one of those portable USB HDD's now, I have a few uses for one it seems now.

I will be checking slickdeals over the next week quite a bit 🙂
Click to expand...

I'm on the same boat. Although I just ordered an external 1.5tb drive yesterday, I would like to use a usb flash drive instead. Been scoping out Slickdeals and haven't found any good usb drives with fast read/ write speeds. There are a few "okay" deals now but the drives are rated roughly 10/10 for read/ write.
 
GiN said:
I'm on the same boat. Although I just ordered an external 1.5tb drive yesterday, I would like to use a usb flash drive instead. Been scoping out Slickdeals and haven't found any good usb drives with fast read/ write speeds. There are a few "okay" deals now but the drives are rated roughly 10/10 for read/ write.
Click to expand...

I got a 16 GB Patriot Razzo drive and did a series of tests with it with installed games and Xbox Live games. This was the cheapest 16GB drive I could find at Frys.

Games installed to the Razzo performed roughly the same as games installed on the HDD. The only exception was the time it takes to install retail games to the USB drive. Not sure if that's worth paying extra money for the best read/write performance.
 
Queasy said:
Oh, if you're doing all that other stuff than you're probably better off with a HDD. I was suggesting a flash drive solely for portability. Since they limit the space for the USB drives to 16GB not much point of using a HDD if you're only using it for game saves and installs.
Click to expand...

ah, gotcha.

yea it's not going to be exclusively for Xbox 360 or else I would probably just get a thumb drive of that size.
 
Queasy said:
I got a 16 GB Patriot Razzo drive and did a series of tests with it with installed games and Xbox Live games. This was the cheapest 16GB drive I could find at Frys.

Games installed to the Razzo performed roughly the same as games installed on the HDD. The only exception was the time it takes to install retail games to the USB drive. Not sure if that's worth paying extra money for the best read/write performance.
Click to expand...

For the 360, I agree that read speeds are more important than write, but I just don't wanna wait 15 minutes for the game to install vs. 5-7 on a faster drive. For small files, it's not a big problem.

I'll probably hold off for now, since I've just built a new pc and am on it more than my 360 or ps3.
 
GiN said:
For the 360, I agree that read speeds are more important than write, but I just don't wanna wait 15 minutes for the game to install vs. 5-7 on a faster drive. For small files, it's not a big problem.

I'll probably hold off for now, since I've just built a new pc and am on it more than my 360 or ps3.
Click to expand...

Actually, the tests I did showed a 1.5x difference not a 2x difference for the install times. So a 6 minute install became 9 mins. 10 min installs became ~15 mins, etc.
 
Queasy said:
Actually, the tests I did showed a 1.5x difference not a 2x difference for the install times. So a 6 minute install became 9 mins. 10 min installs became ~15 mins, etc.
Click to expand...

Very true, but install speed is dependent on the write speed of your drive. For your drive, it was 1.5x more. I may not be so lucky and have a slower drive (5Mbps).
 
pennylane said:
How fast is loading a game from a usb flash drive compared to loading from the xbox hard drive?
Click to expand...

In the tests I did, it was virtually the same. If you want the details, check out the sig in my link and look for "A look at Xbox 360 performance with a USB flash drive" which is about on page 3 right now.

The results are in tables which don't paste well into ATCG.
 
So here's a question: can I take a single large drive and partition it into to 16GB sections, which the 360 will recognize connected through a single USB port? I imagine it will only mount one partition per USB port unfortunately. I've got a dozen old laptop drives laying around 😀
 
fbrdphreak said:
So here's a question: can I take a single large drive and partition it into to 16GB sections, which the 360 will recognize connected through a single USB port? I imagine it will only mount one partition per USB port unfortunately. I've got a dozen old laptop drives laying around 😀
Click to expand...

I believe it is only one. Also, the Xbox 360 will only recognize up to two USB storage devices connected at the same time.
 
fbrdphreak said:
So here's a question: can I take a single large drive and partition it into to 16GB sections, which the 360 will recognize connected through a single USB port? I imagine it will only mount one partition per USB port unfortunately. I've got a dozen old laptop drives laying around 😀
Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly. It would be great if I could partition my 1.5tb into 16gb sections. Heck, it would be great if I could active the partitioned section I wanted and have the 360 read it. Partition 1, games A-> D and partition 2, games E -> etc. I can dream can't I? Of course this would almost make buying an official HD obsolete.
 
GiN said:
My thoughts exactly. It would be great if I could partition my 1.5tb into 16gb sections. Heck, it would be great if I could active the partitioned section I wanted and have the 360 read it. Partition 1, games A-> D and partition 2, games E -> etc. I can dream can't I? Of course this would almost make buying an official HD obsolete.
Click to expand...
I think you could do that actually. You'd just have to plug the drive into laptop, change partition setup, and reinsert into 360. It's just a relative PITA.

I'll have to give the multi-partition thing a try soon.
 
I'm really tempted to break my SSD out of my PC, throw it in an enclosure, and install a game to it, to see if a real SSD makes a difference in load times.
 
pennylane said:
Wouldn't you be limited by the USB interface?
Click to expand...

Yep. Looks like eurogamer did a test, and read speed is limited to 30mb a second. Which still works out to load games slightly faster than the internal super slow laptop hdd they threw in.

Basically games install to the ssd faster than a USB stick, but read/load times are basically identical between a decent stick and an ssd. And they both work out to be a hair faster than loading from the hdd, about 10% faster it seems. But they install about 50% slower, so there's your tradeoff.

Too bad we still can't attach a real ssd to the internal sata bus. I HATE load times. SSDs are cheap enough at this point that it'd be worthwhile to throw a fast 40gb in there for super fast loads. I've gone to SSD on all my PCs, the difference is so astonishing.
 
Are the usb drives able to be read on the pc using xplorer360 or something? I'd love to be able to download some saves and put them on my xbox.

I'd try, but I don't have any spare flash drives to try it out on.
 
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