What's in that inaccessible 7GB of space? 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." This leaves 1GB for the machine's operating system itself. The console needs these resources and the drive is indeed 20GB, yet it's still like buying a '5-seat' car, only to find that the fuel tank is so big that there's only one seat left in the back. Whatever the reasons, you will never store more than 13GB of stuff on 360's 20GB hard drive. Source: Gamesradar
That part didn't make much sense since if it requires 1GB of HD space for the OS than how does a core system run if it doesn't ship with the HD.
Exactly, that one's going to have me scratching my head for a while. Perhaps they have 1GB partitioned off as a 'vitrual ROM' with which they can issue future patches to the console? Even in that case, 1gb seems a little excessive to me. How big could an embedded gaming OS be? Did it ship with WMP10 or what?
The only thing I can think of is maybe it's tied into Windows Media Center interoperability, but I'd think they should be able to have that store in the main storage area, after all if they want you to be able to stream media I'd think 1GB might be a little small especially if you want to stream a DVD or WMV-HD file from the WMC to the 360.
I think they went with WMP9 on this one, and IE 6 is included. anyone know who ms went with for the hard drives?
Good point. One kind thing I have to say about the 360 though is that the PPC is very effective per clock cycle at rendering video, so it should be great for displaying HiDef if you're right. On the other hand, I certainly agree that 1gb would be extremely paltry for this purpose, considering the massive size of HD films. I suppose if that was the case one would need to stream the video on demand, which would require a lot of bandwidth and considering the relatively small amount of memory on the 360 would likely thrash the HDD pretty bad. At least, best I can figure it.
Does explain a few things about the hard drive. But it doesn't help me figure out why the hard drive has an age rating on it. Seriously, PEGI have given it a 3+ rating, what on earth does that mean? But it is very misleading when you lose whole 7GB of HD space, then again I've lost 11GB on both my 200GB drives, WinXP says their max capacity is 189GB. The mind boggles at what M$ is doing to our HDs.
