X-Box 360 Missing 7 Gigs on Hard Drive! - Video Games Forum

XBoxMarksTheSpot · #1 (**permalink**) 12-09-2005, 08:36 AM

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Word is spreading like a wild fire on the internet: Microsoft only gives 13GB of diskspace with the Xbox 360 instead of the 20GB. Most of you would think I would start bashing at Microsoft for ripping off their customers. Not this time...

While the Xbox 360 does come with a 20GB hard drive, users aren't able to fully use every offered MB. They are in fact only able to use two third of the full disksize.

So where did the other 6-7GB go to? Is Bill storing his secrets on your Xbox 360? I certainly hope so, but that's not quite what's filling it. The lost diskspace is used for backwards compatibility with the older Xbox 1 games. The reason why they are doing this is because they need to emulate the Nvidia GPU they used in the Xbox 1 while they now use ATI GPU's. Nvidia didn't license the transistion, so Microsoft needs to emulate all this.

An other disk eating monster is the Xbox 360 Live options and MS is obviously thinking about the future. Calculating Virtual Memory into the entire picture makes it complete.

The only problem with this scenario is that customers are left in the dark about these little marketing tricks...

***Update 8-dec 7:53PM (CET)

Whether the emulation with the graphics card will hog any diskspace is still being issued. Another point where the Xbox 360 might loose space is the switch between the x86 CPU in the Xbox 1 and the IBM power pc processor inside the Xbox 360. This emulation might be heavy when it comes to disk storage.

XBoxMarksTheSpot · #2 (**permalink**) 12-09-2005, 08:38 AM

Further Hard Drive Mystery Updates Unveiled

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Xbox 360, 13GB diskspace, Continued

By Benoit Leterme: 09 Dec 2005, 11:41 am (CET)
Yesterday we published an article explaining where the Lost 7GB on the Xbox 360 went to. We indicated here, emulation took a large chunk out of the diskspace, but also room for updates, patches, live and backward compatibility with the Xbox 1.

Some of you mailed me in a hurry telling me where the 7GB went to. Although some of our readers had it spot on, some had a different approach to the matter (Must be first time readers). Here's one I can't really agree with:

A correction to your article:

It is a well known fact that you lose hard disk space when formatting. Have a look at any PC with 250gb hard drives and you will find nearly a third missing! Yes, for every hard drive the hard disk can never be formatted to its full capacity.

Hmm, losing 1/3 of your total diskspace after formatting, next time try a different File System, I heard FAT16 is outdated.

Here's an input I can concur with:

I used to work for Insignia Solutions, writing the SoftPC and SoftWindows PC emulators that Microsoft's Virtual PC and to a lesser degree, the Xbox 1 emulator technology is based on.

It's enormously unlikely that the emulator would be heavy on disk space. Emulating an Intel CPU on a PowerPC is quite small, even with heavy optimisations like a threaded execution model or a just-in-time compiler.

The reason the disk space is taken up is much more likely to be due to the game patches that are stored; Halo 1 and 2 for example, don't require anything to be loaded from Xbox Live as I understand it, which means that the bits the emulator can't handle (for speed, or graphics, or Live) would be patched by files on the hard drive at run-time.

Considering the original games shipped on DVDs, the potential is there for a large amount of space to be taken up with these patches, which of course could even include graphic data. And we don't know how many other game patches are on the disk either.

I would like to thank our readers for their input, feel free to send me your 2 cents (We only accept cash).

XBoxMarksTheSpot · #3 (**permalink**) 12-09-2005, 08:46 AM

Microsoft Responds...

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Microsoft has responded with an explanation for the missing 7GB of Xbox 360 hard drive space, following our story yesterday; only 13GB of the 20GB drive is available to users.

"4GB is provided for game 'caching' or other hard drive-specific experiences developers want to build for their game," said a Microsoft spokesperson, referring to the need for games to copy certain files from the game disc - which can be read only slowly - to the hard drive, where they can be accessed quickly.

At times the very quick dedicated memory, the RAM, may be in full use, so the cache is a relatively speedy (for a hard drive) section of disk where such files are temporarily stored.

Furthermore, "2GB is reserved to increase overall system functionality, including things like the Xbox emulator - to enable backwards compatibility - and console and title updates, to allow for continued innovation and expansion."

marksman · #4 (**permalink**) 12-16-2005, 10:19 AM

4gb for caching seems a bit high to me. I still don't know why they went with a 20 gig hard drive. They had to get special production runs for them to begin with.. they could have likely got 40 gig drives for almost the same price.