20 gig HDD with 13.9 available?

[MXracer721]

i dont get why the 360 hard drive is a 20 gig but i can only use 13.9 gig? it says the rest is set aside for "system use". what system use? what is this 6 gig being used for? i dont get why the system needs to use 6 gig when theres an xbox w/o a hard drive being sold?

btw, this may have already been talked about but for some reason the searching wasnt workin so i made a new thread.

[vman]

I believe most of it is pre-loaded movies, demos, music, etc. but I think a good part of it is for the OS.

[Rochey69r]

i to wonder that. 6.1gb is far too much lost space. none of it is OS as the unit runs everything without a hardrive attatched. the only thing i noticed was mine came with about 10-20 songs preloaded on it. i mean i could understand losing 2-3 gb but 6.1 is far too much.

bottom line is dont worry, everyones xbox has the same 13.9 available when u get it new. this is normal.

[Crazy Joe]

it's for the backwards compatibility, original Xbox had an 8 gig hard drive, part of which was set aside for game saves, caching, etc. To play original Xbox games, this has to be there and available, whatever isn't available is how much is needed i guess.

[Nth Turtle]

It's funny, I always assumed that it was there for the patches of every single online game that will come out in the console's lifespan. I mean I don't think there's a title yet that hasn't been patched at some point in it's post-production stage.

Used to be you could buy a 'complete' game, now they ship it before it's done and fix whatever problems crop up.
(Or don't fix them in some cases :cuss: )
I presumed Microsoft had set aside 7Gig for those people that have the cash to buy most games and need patches for them all.

Is that just me being a cynical bast@rd or what? :confused:

[Reclaimer]

Used to be you could buy a 'complete' game, now they ship it before it's done and fix whatever problems crop up.
(Or don't fix them in some cases :cuss: )
I presumed Microsoft had set aside 7Gig for those people that have the cash to buy most games and need patches for them all.

Is that just me being a cynical bast@rd or what? :confused:

Yes, you're being cynical. PC games need to be patched. Original Xbox games needed patches, 360 games need patches sometimes, that's just the way it is now and it's going to be like that as the new way of doing business. I would rather have a company be able to remotely update my games then just have to deal with glitches and playability problems.

The 7 gigs is a dedicated partition space on the hard drive for the 360 to use for system files. Yes, you don't need a hard drive to play the 360, but you do for backwards compatibility. If you look at the backwards compatibility list, that's a long list and every one of those games requires a separate emulator program. BC isn't a patch for the old games, it's an individual emulation software piece that you need. That's where your hard drive space went.

[Nth Turtle]

Yes, you're being cynical... I would rather have a company be able to remotely update my games then just have to deal with glitches and playability problems... The 7 gigs is a dedicated partition space on the hard drive for the 360 to use for system files... That's where your hard drive space went.

Yeah, I was kinda being facetious, but I guess that never came across online so well. I couldn't give a stuff about the space they've used, never came close to filling my Xbox HD and I doubt I'll get close to filling my 360 one either.

But speaking of b/c, they've taken a 7 Gig partition of your drive, but they've virtually stopped all backwards emulation now. I mentioned this in another thread but I'll repeat it here:


"All games will be b/c...
...well almost all...
...well most of the guid ones...
...shut up and take what you get..."

I'm still waiting to be able to play my LoW and Worms Mayhem. I think they have a whole team of 1 working on backwards emulation now... and he's only on part time hours... on loan to another department...

[CrazyCougar]

I would say BC is a part of it, as well as updates to the system every fall and spring. Also there is probably room on their for add-ons and such at later times. But honestly its not a big deal as you really wont use that 13.9 gig for quite sometime, unless you keep everything you download off the marketplace.

[MXracer721]

the backwards compatibility makes sense.....it would be nice to be able to pick which games you needed emulated on ur 360. maybe when u put the game in, it would say "not compatible, would u like to download the emulator" and get it from xbox live, so if u have 5 Xbox games u have 5 emulators not a few gigs of them. oh well, im not close to filling my hard drive, i just wanted to make sure i wasnt the only one with this problem. thanks for your help.

[Go420Dawgs]

The 20 GB HD has a couple gigs partitioned so that it can load data off the game disc when its inserted. So when your playing a game it loads off the hard drive and the actual dvd-rom at the same time. But yeah once you delete all the preloaded crap there should be a gig or 2 more available worth of HD space.:cheers:

[Crazy Joe]

the backwards compatibility makes sense.....it would be nice to be able to pick which games you needed emulated on ur 360. maybe when u put the game in, it would say "not compatible, would u like to download the emulator" and get it from xbox live, so if u have 5 Xbox games u have 5 emulators not a few gigs of them. oh well, im not close to filling my hard drive, i just wanted to make sure i wasnt the only one with this problem. thanks for your help.


the space isn't just for the emulators, the emulators aren't that big as far as i know, when you put an Xbox game in an Xbox 360, it NEEDS HD space because it was made for an Xbox which had a HD guaranteed, alot of games programmed caching and other things that needed a certain amount of HDD space available, so this space needs to be available