Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Xbox 360 hard drive missing 7GB

The Xbox 360 apparently ships with that *cough* mammoth *cough* 20GB hard disk already two-thirds full. Only 13GB is user accessible by default, which Microsoft claims is used as follows:

4GB is used for game caching, should a game developer choose to use it in such a way. This is analogous to the virtual memory space in your computer.

2GB is used for increasing system functionality, things like upgrades and the emulator used for backwards compatibility with original Xbox titles.

The final 1GB is used for pre-loaded game demos and videos, which the user can delete.

So for a 20GB hard drive, you'll never be able to touch a full 6GB of it. 4GB for a disc cache sounds way too large. the VM in my computer is only 2GB, so unless developers plan on caching the entire DVD on the drive, this seems wasteful.

This isn't the first device with a hard drive that shipped with user-inaccessible space (TiVo comes to mind), but it might be the first with so much used at the outset.

read more | digg story

No comments: