Any particular Hard Drive to get for a XBOX mod?

[Anthony1]

I have head a couple of things about buying a hard drive to use in a XBOX mod.

The first thing that I heard, is that the XBOX will not recognize a drive bigger than 137 GB. I heard that you could use a 200 GB hard drive if you want, but that the XBOX can only see 137 GB of it.

Thus, I heard that there really isn't much of a point to getting a hard drive bigger than 120 GB's.

The second thing I heard, is that if you can get one that is 5800 rpms instead of 7200, then get that one. Supposedly it's hard to find Hard Drives anymore with 5800 rpms, but for some reason they seem to work better with the XBOX then the newer 7200 rpm ones.

Does anybody know anything about any of this? Have you guys heard anything about any specific hard drives to get?

Normally, I would have just gone out and bought a 150 GB 7200 RPM with a 8MG buffer. But after hearing some of these rumors about not going over 137, and trying to find one with 5800 rpm, I want to make sure that I'm not getting the wrong type of hard drive.

[Spoony Bard]

Similar problem in a PC. I bought a 160GB Harddrive, and had to install a special card into a PCI slot to get it to work completely. At least with older motherboards (I donno about current stuff) the IDE cap was 137GB.

[FABombjoy]

137GB+ is supported by newer xbox bioses.

There are a few reasons to use a 5400 RPM drive. Power consumption + heat. Apparently, there is also no speed advantage between the two. Search for modding FAQs, they've got the lowdown.

[sniperCCJVQ]

Similar problem in a PC. I bought a 160GB Harddrive, and had to install a special card into a PCI slot to get it to work completely. At least with older motherboards (I donno about current stuff) the IDE cap was 137GB.

I just flashed my BIOS and now it support 48 bits (> 137 GB) HD.

Have you check about flashing yours ?

[DogP]

I've got a 7200 RPM 120 gig in mine... no problems, and with the new bios, larger than 137 gig is supported. The only reason for getting a 5400 RPM is for less heat, but a 7200 RPM would be faster (ATA 133, 100, etc isn't faster though). The reason 7200 RPM is faster is because it takes less time for the disk to spin to the place it needs to be, so it's a faster seek time. The data transfer (ATA 66+), which is controlled by the disk controller won't matter, because it doesn't support anything faster than 33, so it'll only run the HD at 33 meg/s.

DogP

[Hamsnibit]

I have a 160 gig Maxtor 5400 in mine. I have the latest bios to support all 160 and it works fine. In tests done by many people there are no speed advantages using a 7200 over a 5400 cause it can only access the data so fast because of the hardware limitations of the xbox.

[GaijinPunch]

120GB 7200 RPM here, and no problems at all.
I think the official warning is no 10,000 RPM drives, as they'll heat up your box.

www.xbox-scene.com -- worlds of information

[Sylentwulf]

Just for the record, PC's will support ANY size hard drive, just partition it. I didn't flash or update anything for my 160GB, I just partitioned it into 2 80GB drives. I'd rather have 3-4 smaller drive letters anyways for backup and safety purposes.

As for the Xbox RPM question. It probably won't make any difference in speed, which is why they recommend going for a 5400RPM, They're usually a bit cheaper. That's all. The power and heat won't be an issue since the xbox won't spin the hard drive above 5400RPM if it can't read any faster than 5400RPM.

5400RPM isn't the constant speed, it's the MAX speed. So if you put a 7200 RPM in there, it's not going to spin at 7200RPM, and read at 5400RPM. It's going to spin at whatever speed the xbox tells it to spin UP TO 5400RPM (Since the xbox won't tell it to spin any faster than that)

So, basically, get the 5400RPM if it will save you a couple bucks, otherwise, don't worry about it. TIVO's are the same way, I put a 7200RPM in there because it was the same price, and "couldn't hurt"

[Chunky]

i bought a seagate barracuda 7200rpm 120, the only reason i picked this up was it was on sale and it runs cooler and quieter than the WD i was looking at. I saw people have some problems locking a drive?


now if my mod ever comes in i may just install it. If i can figure out how to flash the bios, or whatever i need to do i really don't understand it yet.

[FABombjoy]

The power and heat won't be an issue since the xbox won't spin the hard drive above 5400RPM if it can't read any faster than 5400RPM.

5400RPM isn't the constant speed, it's the MAX speed. So if you put a 7200 RPM in there, it's not going to spin at 7200RPM, and read at 5400RPM. It's going to spin at whatever speed the xbox tells it to spin UP TO 5400RPM (Since the xbox won't tell it to spin any faster than that)

Hard drive spindle speed is constant, not variable (unlike multispeed CD-ROM drives). You cannot slow the speed of a drive. If drives were to change speeds, you'd hear them spin up and down constantly. With the weight of the platters, it would take a serious spindle motor to hold up to that kind of stress.

The reason that 7200 drives read at the same speed is because the IDE controller is limited to ATA33 speeds. The drive has the data ready quickly, but the controller is slow in picking it up.

There is supposedly some advantage had by using an ATA100 cable. See:
http://www.llamma.com/xbox/Mods/ata_100_mod.htm

If the above mod works, then the xbox must have a controller that supports speeds faster than ATA33. I have an extra ATA100 cable and may give this a shot.

[NE146]

I wouldn't sweat the details too much. If you got the latest bios for whatever chip you have. You generally should be able to plop most any reasonable hard drive in there with no problems. Keep it simple.

[sideswipe]

250 Gig WD 7200 rpm in one of mine. Works fine, lotsa room

[leonk]

A big reason why people upgrade their XBOX HD is so that they will be able to download all their XBOX games to the console and play it off the HD, rather than carry dozens of DVD's with them to what ever LAN part they take the system too..

In this case, you have to remember that even a 5400 rpm HD is MUCH MUCH faster than a DVD drive (seek times are in the low ms rather than the higher ones).

Result: 5400 rpm drives are much faster than DVD and fast enough to allow DVD playback from the HD.

So unless you're installing Linux on that HD, anything bigger than 5400 rpms has more negative effects (heat kills..) than positive (faster game saves?!)

[Gunstarhero]

I would get the one that holds the most roms.