Removable Hard Drive, Laptop or Regular IDE? Options

[hairypottah]

What will be the form factor of the removable hard drive? I suspect that it will be 2.5 as in micro\mini\ AKA Laptop hard drive, which as far as upgadeability is concerned will affect the price and limit the maximum size availiable. So does anyone know for sure if it's a small or regular size IDE eh? Eh? Anyone? As of right now the largest availiable micro is 100gb and it retails for about $150, but that's not soo bad, unless you consider how cheap you can get a regular size 100Gb for.

It seems it would be more expensive for them to use laptop HD as well, but maybe not.

[armless]

yeah i'm almost positive that will be a laptop drive, but actually now i think samsung or somebody made a 120GB laptop drive.

[Ozy]

yeah i'm almost positive that will be a laptop drive, but actually now i think samsung or somebody made a 120GB laptop drive.

And I bet somebody made it very expensive.

120GB IDE HD would cost £60.
40GB laptop drive would also cost £60.
120GB laptop drive would cost a lot more than £60.

[jk009]

I bet it will be a mixture between a laptop and a propritary drive

[xzphatboizx69]

It may be speacilty drives, made only for the 360. Could be something like an iPod HDD. I think it will be a 2.5 laptop drive, since its cheaper for M$ to use laptop drives. Think about it, they are already losing money on the hardware, why spend more money on speacilty drives. As for the connector i doubt it will be IDE, probally a speaicl plug.

[cromat44]

It looks like iit's a 2.5" hardrive. The width of a standard 3.5" harddrive show it couldn't possibly fit like shown in the pictures. It is definataly not a microdrive since they are incredibly expensvie per gb and aren't on the marcket in 20gb capacities yet. According to hitachi, the new microdrices are 8 and 10gb... and mircrodrives are what are used in ipod minies, they are the size of a standard compact flash card... So the housing is proporionataly too large for a microdrive...

So, logical conlusion, a 2.5" (laptop standard) hardrive or a custom drive. The custom drive would just add unncessecary cost to MS with no obvious benefit but to stop people like us. I'm pretty suure it will be a 2.5" harddrive

[Ozy]

It will have SATA connection according to the official xbox magazine (UK) xbox 360 issue.

Seeing as it is all official info with it been owned my M$ then I would say it is accurate.

[mbratton]

my best guess would be to say that it is a standard 2.5 hdd with a laptop ide to sata converter in the casing, then the case has a sata connector on it.... which would make 3.5 inch drives freeeeeking easy to use.

[hairypottah]

Well in that case, yeah, it might be a little bit more expensive to upgrade and I don't think it will be a proprietary drive, probably just a regular laptop hard drive. However, the connections and the housing will be proprietary I'm sure of that. There may even be a chip other hardware connector in addition to formatting that will make it difficult to just crack it open and pop in a store bought drive. But we'll figure all that out eventually, come on Nov.!!!

[hb2k]

i am sure whatever drive come on the 360 some1 will find a way to hack a 400gb maxtor 3.5" HDD to work. and lots of game will fit considering it is only a 9gb max per game

[flashfreak]

It may be speacilty drives, made only for the 360. Could be something like an iPod HDD. I think it will be a 2.5 laptop drive, since its cheaper for M$ to use laptop drives.

It may be a specialty one, iPod hard drives are literally tiny and it'd be a waste of space in that enclosure they have. J Allard said somewhere that they'd worked out every part so they'd make profit, so maybe they've found a cheap source of 2.5" hard drives. I don't think they'd make a specialty one unless they found a company to do it for cheap and maybe even take out some standard PC parts as it'd only need to work in the xbox, but then again theres not much you can take out.

Theres no point to hack it until a modchip comes out, which may be a while. 20 gig is ok for what it'll be used for without the chip, so theres no need to hack it yet (even though its not out )

[hairypottah]

Sure there's no need to hack it, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to have a couple of 100gb removable drives with your games sorted by genre on each drive to swap in and out and play off of. Also call me what you will, but as a happily softmodded and HDD upgraded XBOX owner I have a very strong feeling that with all the features they're piling into the system in addition to playing games, a software exploit is not only a possibility but an inevitability. I mean, c'mon this is M$ we're talking about. All I know is those firs-gen people are going to have it the easiest, 'cuz for every update or version with an updated BIOS/Firmware etc. . .it's just gonna be a long drawn out game of cat and mouse.

I'd have to say the convenience and flexibility of storing and running all my games on a hard drive without having to insert a disc is more of a reason for modding than anything. Not to mention all the other benefits.

Oh and the 360 will have a remote on-off feature from the wireless controllers. . .*drool* so that means once you sit down to game it'll be like football, get your snacks, drinks and extra controller battery packs and you don't have to get up for nothing but nature. . .damn nature.

This post has been edited by hairypottah: May 31 2005, 03:23 AM

[jonrees69]

I'm not sure it will be a smaller laptop type for a few reasons :

1: Reliability
2: Size - If M$ Want you to save games on there it's gotta be large - 3.5" is restrictive.
3: Cost - 3.5" or 2.5" will put the price up.
4: SATA on a 3.5" ? really ? ... expensive at best.

SATA, probably, normal/modded normal size more than likely.

The DVD on the other hand will most likely be a smaller type from the photos I've seen although again, this would restrict performance.

It's mostly rumours and suposition at the moment anyway ! lol

J

[OR-G]

Thought SATA was fairly inexpensive. It's just because it's new tech that they can sell it for a bit more, but often you'll find SATA deals that closely rival PATA drives. I believe there are adapters that allow a PATA -> SATA. So you would still be able to use your PATA drives. such as PATA to SATA

Then I believe there is a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter, or one could be made with the following information HD Info

So unless it's custom, it'd be easy to hook another HD up to it. As long as the modchip could find a way to bypass the security.

[incognegro]

I think they are using that new technolgy they patented awhile back. The one about incorparating flash technology in hard drive to make read speeds extremely fast. Im sure MS wants to own all the tech in the system, so why not?