Hi all,

I'm currently working on a xbox mod and trying to install a new hd. My plan is to hardwire a compact flash to IDE adapter to the xbox and install a 8/16 gb compact flash drive. The xbox will only be used to play steel battalion and lines of contact, they're about 1.5 gb in size. Would this work? I'd like to install a stripped down dashboard, just enough to play those 2 games and support vga out. Any ideas?

thx

It all depends on the adapter..

if the adapter cant emulate jumper settings (slave/master) then your probably out of luck.
but even if it does emulate the jumper settings i cant guarantee it will work at all..

Yeah the adapter has a slave/master jumper. As far as i can tell the adapter doesn't emulate anything, the CF card works as a tiny ide disk. What kind of read/write speed should i be looking for?

What size would be necessary?

the xbox is limited to ata-100 controller. so you wont ever get faster than 100Mb's
The size is all dependant on what you are going to want to put on there. but a minimum of 8gb would be recomended, thats should give you a few Gb free to add a game or 2, 16Gb would leave a reasonable ammount of space.
I would normaly recomend a minimum of 160Gb

I am assuming that you will be tsop flashing or chipping the box, because i some how doubt that a cf card can be locked like an ata drive.

Ok I see. At what speed do most ide hdd's run? While searching i've seen 40mb/s read/write speeds, some up to 90. The cf are available in 40/60/90 mb/s speeds. I'll be using this xbox in a steel battalion mod, so I only need those 2 games installed. The stripped down games are 1.36 and 0.27 gb in size. I'm guessing these would fit fine on a 8gb card?

I'll be using a duox2 chip, I've used one before and it's the only modchip available here

off the top of my head there is about 4gb free on E with a stock 8Gb drive..
Not 100% on that as i rarley leave a stock drive in for more than a few mins.. But I think thats about right..
transfer of 90 would probably be about as fast as you could hope to manage on an xbox any way.
But the standard xbox ide cable is limited to ATA 33.. (40 wire)
So if your using that cable then theres no point trying to get 90MB out of anything, you would need an ide 80 cable to get the speeds out of it.

hard drive speeds are rated by there type and basically are ..
Ata-100 "100MB"
ata 133 "133MB"
sata "150MB"
sata 2 "300MB"
sata 3 "600MB"

Can you get higher speed out of the xbox with a ide 80 cable? I thought the xbox hardware was limited to ata 33. I'll be soldering the adapter directly to the motherboard via a pinheader, so i guess that would count as a high speed cable .

actually direct solder to the pin header would work out like a (40 wire) cable.
Where as if you want better than 33Mb you would want a 80 wire cable..

The xbox hardware is ATA-100..
the cable is ata-33... So yes lots of us upgrade the 40 wire cable to an 80 wire cable to utilize the extra speed..

With out saying its pixies and magic that does it all..
the basic of how it works (80 vs 40 wire) is that with a 40 wire all the ground gets fed back thropugh about 4 wires and causes feedback.. "crosstalk"
ata 80 wire cables sends the ground back through all the aditional 40 extra wires that were added, so you eliminate Lots of the feedback "crosstalk." and that in turn increases the max throughput of the system..
they had to change to 80 wires to get faster then 33MB's

(you may want to google for more information on how it works)

I will give a general every day eexample of the the diference..

(this is nopt really a quote its just breaking up the post for you)


i think that covers it all..

but yeah basics are..
if your soldering directly then you will "more than likley" be limited to 33Mb's so theres no point geting a faster cf card. (im not sure exactly how much of the corsstalk would be eliminated by having no wires for the crosstalk to be able to compromize the data traveling, and thats why i say more than likley.)

if you want to get the most out of your hardware you may want to think about making a custom 80 wire ata cable, (or atleast trimming down an existion one so it only has one connector.)
and
the xbox is ata 100, limited by the cheapo wire.

Ok so the 80 ribbon is basically a shielded version. If i were to connect the data lines via fine coax cable, with their shielding connected to ground, that would give the same effect right?

Is there a noticable difference in speed when loading games of the hdd between 40 and 80?

CF work just fine I have one and I tried several different CF cards before I found one that worked well. Find one that is 133x or better. anything slower and it doesn't work correctly. I'll have to double check, but if i recall correctly, I think I finally ended up on a 200x card that seemed to work the best. BTW CF X ratings can be translated to data speeds by multiplying the number by 150 (exactly like with CD-ROMS). So a 133x CF card is just under 20MB/sec and a 200x is ~30MB/sec.




As for the 40 vs 80, you can't just ground the 40 wire some way. The purpose of the 80 isn't just grounding, it also is for physical separation and isolation. But it is all really moot since you will be using a CF adapter plugged directly into the MB. Not sure why you would want to go to the trouble of soldering directly, but I am sure you have your reasons. I have done it two ways, buy a male ide/cf adapter and plug directly to the onboard adapter, and I have also used a female cf/ide adapter with a trimmed down stubby ide cable, which allowed me to get the CF into a Slim mod I made (as the male adapter standing straight up was too tall to fit the slim mod. Obvioulsly, this method would allow the use of an 80wire cable... hint hint...

And as for the noticeable speed difference between a 40/80, well i can't say as I can see a difference, but I am not normally the person that sees that stuff. (I don't see fluorescent lights flicker, I can't see rainbow effects on DLP TV,s, etc. etc...) But there are people that say it is technically faster and I am not saying that it isn't, I am just saying that I cant see it.
-PTF

Sorry, I put some misinformation in my previous post. I was at work and couldn't verify my memory. When I got home, I looked at my system and checked my notes. I had tried a 133x card, and I could not get that to work with XBMC. It did work fine with Avalaunch, but I never got working correctly with XBMC. Since I had to go buy a new card at that point, I bought the fastest one I could afford at the time which was a 266x (~40MB/Sec). XBMC runs great on it, so it might work at 200x or 233x, i never tried those. It does work great on 266x.

It was discussed a long time ago in this thread, although it seems that faster cards are now available and may work as Patty has mentioned.

http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=646202

Fyi that zune drive still works in the box I put it in, although the xbox no longer gets used all that much.

Thanks for all the information! I was planning on getting a 400x CF, so it should work alright :-)