Worth upgrading the xbox 360 hd to install games?

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playrh8r

Gawd
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Aug 18, 2004
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Hi All,

With the new xbox experience comes the ability to install games. Right now I'm on a 20gb drive. Would it be worth it to upgrade to the 120gb just for the ability to install games? The DVD drive sound would be nice to quiet down, but for the $130-150 price of the drive is it really worth it?

I'd love to hear from those who have done this.

Thanks

Jeff
 
I'm guessing only you know how much your money is really worth, so any advice you receive would be too subjective to be useful.

Short answer: no.

Slightly longer: there are guides to modding the hard drive yourself for a third of the cost. It's somewhat involved but worth it to not spend a ton on some proprietary POS thing from Microsoft.
 
Money isn't a problem. I am more concerned about the HD space after installs. I have about 8-9 games I would want to install. Is there much functional benefit other than quicker load times (doesn't bother me) or drive noise?

It doesn't sound like there is. I may end up getting a 120gb drive for extra space for demos, xbox live media etc. But solely for game installs it doesn't sound like it's a huge benefit.

Jeff
 
I have a 120gb hdd on my 360 and its nice having the room but prolly not really worth it. Sure it can hold a lot of demos but those are mostly play once or twice and delete because you can always redownload them.

As far as game installs, ive only done that for one game so far, NCAA Football 09. It loads only marginally faster (a few seconds at best) HOWEVER the lack of dvd drive noise is well worth it in my opinion, the console is noticeably quieter with the game installed. That game takes like 8gb i think, and most should be 6-8 so you can easily have 10+ games installed.

Side note you still have to have the game in the drive even if its installed, it checks it for security purposes, then doesnt spin after that.
 
playrh8r said:
Money isn't a problem. I am more concerned about the HD space after installs. I have about 8-9 games I would want to install. Is there much functional benefit other than quicker load times (doesn't bother me) or drive noise?

It doesn't sound like there is. I may end up getting a 120gb drive for extra space for demos, xbox live media etc. But solely for game installs it doesn't sound like it's a huge benefit.

Jeff
Click to expand...

The difference in loading times isn't that big. In fact it's virtually non-existent in most online play, seeing as how there's no guarantee that everybody you're playing with will have the game installed.

Also remember that the 20gb harddrive only has about 11gb of usable space. I had to trash all of my music, videos, and a lot of old demos/gamedata to install two freekin' games. My advice is to install one game, and see if the difference in noise is significant to you.
 
I have all 8 of my 360 games installed. Definitely a lot quieter and loads a little faster. Probably the game that exhibits the biggest difference is Lost Odyssey. That game would just grind and grind and grind the disc drive away, also there would be occasional slow downs. Now it runs smooth like butter. One downside is the game is 4 discs long and you'll need to swap the discs depending what disc image you are playing on (which I predicted before NXE, but all the naysayers tried to say otherwise. Told you so!).
 
Makes a huge difference in some games, not so much in others. I recently installed Lost Odyssey (just the last disk), Orange Box, and Oblivion to the hard drive. All three were improved TREMENDOUSLY. Oblivion went from a grind to enjoyable, since it requires you to "Load" for 30 seconds every 2 minutes. The load time there was cut down to 10 seconds for most transitions.
 
Numerous Target stores had the 120GB hard drives on clearance for around 90 dollars. If you could find one that "cheap" I'd definitely go for it. However, it's become quite hard (or maybe even impossible), to find a Target that still has them on clearance. I could be wrong, but me and a friend of mine had checked numerous stores in two different states with no luck.
 
I haven't looked into this yet, totally forgot about the installs. How do you go about doing it and does every game support it?

I know Left 4 Dead takes a year and a day to load to the start menu; just like other Valve games, it loads everything at the beginning which shortens load times later. Still takes forever.

<edit> Nm, google is teh rok
 
I upgraded my 20GB to a 60GB. I love the game install feature.

-Much quieter
-Less texture pop in
-Little faster loads

I picked up the 60GB hard drive used off ebay for less than retail and using MS Live Search cashback though.
 
SPARTAN VI said:
I haven't looked into this yet, totally forgot about the installs. How do you go about doing it and does every game support it?

I know Left 4 Dead takes a year and a day to load to the start menu; just like other Valve games, it loads everything at the beginning which shortens load times later. Still takes forever.
Click to expand...

I can tell you a couple games that don't support it, right off the bat. The Burger King games from like a year ago. Other then that I haven't heard of any other titles that don't work. It should also be pointed out that there are some games that SHOULDN'T be installed. Halo 3 is one of them, and Bungie themselves have stated not to install the game. You can install it if you want, but it actually makes loading times worse. It's because the game already caches data to the hard drive, and if you have it installed it's reading from the install and writing to the system/cache section simultaneously, slowing performance.

It's easy to install games though. While in the NXE, and with a game in the try, when you go to the channel to launch the game, I think if you hit Y it brings up some info and options. One of them is to copy the game to the HD.
 
Thanks all for your insight. I decided to wait a bit to see if prices drop. I bought fable 2 instead :)
 
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I would say it's worth it just to shut the DVD drive up. My Elite is virtually silent when playing games now.
 
Some games will load faster, but others can load slower from the hard drive (halo3).

I plan on using this feature only on the games that constantly use the dvd drive to prevent wear (COD, mass effect, fable, fallout, etc).
 
i bought a new 120GB drive for my 360 a few days before the NXE just so i could install my games and not having to listen to the DVD noise was worth the 150 CND i paid, i don't care so much about load times but the noise was killing me, now its almost as quite as my PS3, and with the transfer software that came with it my 360 was exactly as was before i changed the drive.

but i will say if MS hadn't added the install feature i would have never spent the money.
 
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