We spoke with Aaron Greenberg this morning at his hotel room (full video of the meetup coming shortly today), and discussed Xbox 360 Storage.
With the new ability to rip your game discs directly into your Xbox 360 system coming with the New Xbox Experience on November 19th, the trade-off for being able to load your games up to 30% faster than using the disc drive is that you’re going to have to ditch your 20GB hard drive before you know it.
While Greenberg tiptoed around answering my question about lowering the price of the 120GB drive ($149.99) he did bring up the new 60GB model that debuts with a 3 month GOLD Live membership and a headset (in case you needed an extra headset.) That baby comes in at about 2/3 the price of its bigger cousin at $99.99.
While I am super-stoked about all the cool stuff my 360 is going to be able to do for me soon, I can’t help but scratch my head about the new drives. I mean 60 Gigs for a hundred dollars still seems steep to me. But on the flip side, I would be willing to pay more to save my DVD drive from the wear and tear.
It does help that streaming Netflix means I won’t have to store huge movie files on my wittle dwive.
Any of youthink you’ll pony up the 99 or 149 smackers to upgrade your storage for NXE?
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I mean 60 Gigs for a hundred dollars still seems steep to me.
Well, do you remember when we used to have to buy the 20GB for $100?
I had 2 Elite systems (now I only have 1) and I kept the HD of the one I gave away, so now I have 240GB of space, but here is the question:
How is this feature going to help the market?
I mean, yes is cool, but what stops people from renting the game at Blockbuster or Gamefly, record it into your HD and then never even have to buy the game?
The picture is too awesome XDXD
Is it Friday already?
nope
all true
@djdsf I am sure that there is SOME sort of DRM involved here. Kinda wish I asked.
I guess being able to rip the games to my hard drive is pretty cool, but I really don’t see the point. It’s almost as if they’re doing it just to do it. I take pretty good care of my discs and don’t see why I would bother wasting space on my hard drive with something I have stored elsewhere. Maybe I’m alone in this way of thinking, but I just don’t see the point. If I’m missing something here, please let me know. Thanks.
I’ve read on other sites that you will still have to put the game you saved on the harddrive into the disc drive to boot it up. But once that initial process is done the disc will stop spinning.
You have to have thes disc in the drive to play, It was on Xbox.com
It doesn’t spin or read the disc, but you still need it to verify ownership.
harpox2 is right. Installing to the HD will not save you from having to use your discs. The disc has to be in the drive for the game to load – that’s their answer to the rent-rip-return-play forever problem. Really the only benefit we get from all this is quicker loading, less wear and tear on the disc, and an engraved invitation to buy an expensive extra hard drive.
Haven’t decided if I will use this option yet…maybe just for the one or two games that I play the most.
@ Doc:
Well, that is what we are here for.
The community helps fill in the gaps that you can’t see because of the excitement.
@ASmellyPiratHkr:
You forgot drive noise too, I played through fable over the weekend and my god, the disk spinning up and crunching away every 10 minutes really got annoying
@djdsf
To be able to play games saved on your HDD you still require the disc to be in the acutal disc drive to be able to play it.
djdsf:
Yeah $100 for a 20 Gb drive, try paying £79.99 for the same when they came out over here.
That’s roughly $160! Or was up until a few days ago…
@MayThe27TheBeWithYou:
Watch the video, no spinning disk means that you don’t need to get up and change Disks every time you want to play a new game.
If you still had to do that (put in the disk) then it kinda defeats the purpose of having the game in the HD in the first place.
@djdsf:
Yeah, no point in the shorter load times , quiter operation and less wear and tear on the system.
*rolly eye emoticon*
@ Infneon:
Ok, they believe that they will have 30% less losd times, big woop.
I really don’t worry to much about quieter operation because I play with Turtle Beach headphones on and I hear nothing but the game.
Also, if you know how to take care of your console (clean it, put in a disk drive cleaner cd in every few months or so) and don’t neglect it, you will be fine.
I still have my original Xbox that I bought about more or less 1 month after the launch and it still works perfectly, I’m sure that the motor that was purposely build to spin the CDs and nothing else will not die because of a few less CDs that it still has to read for a few how ever long in the beginning which still makes noise.
I’ve never fallen under 7 gigs off of my 20 gig HD, and I usually just play one game at a time, so save for completely packed double layer DVDs, I don’t care all that much.
Still, sucks, Microsoft continue to be equal to themselves.
Hells Yeah!! Totally glad I got the elite.
For me, what this really really means…..
Is no more unreadable discs…
I can’t stand that. If its ripped in, once I prove I won it, dude I’m done with that annoyance.
@ djdsf:
Not everyone has money to pay for expensive headphones, the patience to sit through repeated long ass load times or puts in high ammounts care and attention to their system.
Just because it has no benefit Mr. Perfect, doesn’t mean the masses won’t benefit.
so this is Mircosoft’s solution to the disk scratching issues?
Ok, here’s my problem with the pricing of the 60 & 120GB HDDs: Even though the 60GB HD costs only $100, it has worse value than the 120GB. The 60GB costs $1.66 per GB, while the 120GB costs $1.25 per GB. So buying the 120GB version is a better deal if you’re looking for more value when using your hard earned green-backs.
I’m so excited about this feature. The load time should make a difference and the lack of noise should be nice as well. I’ve already got the 120GB drive so I’m ready for this when it comes out.
So two things. I am now using the NXE update and installing my first game. but I have Halo 3 but the disk is damaged and I cant install it or play campain after half way though. if I borrow a friends disk will that allow me to play mine fully though. with the scratch? also is there a way to RIP DvD’s onto the HDD yet?
Thanks for your info! email me
Actually, if you install the game to your hard drive and then rip the game to a dvd just well enough to pass the verification test it is basically rent from Blockbuster rip to hard drive and dvd- play forever.
@Bullfrog
Yeah it doesn’t have to be the same disc, just rip his disc and use yours to pass the verification test because all games are essentially exactly the same/carbon copies.
I think this is a great feature for people with the space for it. I mean if you have a 20G Drive(what i have), well this feature isnt really for you, unless u dont have any Demos and have one game ripped at a time. But people with bigger drive can use this feature, so its not a stupid thing to have on the xbox. I mean the feature is there, use it or dont.
I know about the noise problem with the disk spining, been there, but then again you need the space. What someone else brought up in this was about the loading in fable and the noise. Well I completly agree with him, the noise would be reduced, plus load times are 30% reduced. mose people would say, yeah its only 30%, well think of 30% at every load time. So if you have lets say 5 minutes of load time on a gaming session, then you would have 1 minute and 30 sec more to play. and thats just in a single session, if you take the matter and expand it in hours of load time over the course of weeks. You would save 36 minutes for 2 hours of load time. I think that its a good feature to have, only downfall again is the size.
The other concern that Microsoft could have problems with is the cracker comunity. If this feature exist, then they’re obviously going to take advantage of it. To lay it out, what could be possible is that after installing a game, it requires the disk to be present for validation. I’m sure someone will be able to make a fake disk, or a ripped copy that would simply provide that validation. I would say that its a matter of time before this feature is abused and people will rent, copy and play forever. If this happens, Hard drive space would be critical. But where not up there yet.
To put it simply, this new feature has great benifits for people with HDD space. If you dont have space, then get more if you feel the need to use the feature. And in the end, you have to ask yourself. Is it worth it?