Xbox 360: Install games to Pen Drive = Faster Loads?

[capcom_suicide]

Hi,

If you have a really good 16GB Pen Drive, say 25-30mbs seaktime, would that be faster for loading games, rather than DVD/HDD?

I am thinking it should be:

SolidState>HDD>DVD

Depending of course on the quality of your USB pen drive.

Anyone seen any tech tests on this yet?

It only costs ?17 for a decent 16GB sandisk pendrive from Play.com, so just figured it might be a cheap way to improve speeds on a couple of your favourite games..

[anephric]

I don't see how USB 2.0 can be faster than SATA.

[speedlolita]

SATA is gonna be better.

JTag your 360 and install an SSD in the hard drive enclosure.

[randombs]

25-30Mb/s isn't fast enough. That's Megabits per second. In actual Megabytes, that translates to 3-4MB/s read speed. Write speed will be even slower than that. The DVD read speed can get up to about 15MB/s at its fastest speed (12X)

The 360's hard drive will probably read at least at around 15-20MB/s or so (I'm basing that on actual transfer speeds for 2.5" sata drives on laptops I've seen. My 7200rpm 2.5" drive goes up to around 60MB/s, and around 40-50MB/s over USB, and my 5400rpm drives do around 20-30MB/s).

Are you talking about officially installing games or installing them on a modded 360? If the latter, then there's nothing stopping you trying it out yourself to see, as speedlolita's said about JTagging.

USB2's theoretical maximum speed is 480mb/s (60MB/s) whereas the sata interface on the 360 will do I think around 150MB/s max.

[capcom_suicide]

25-30Mb/s isn't fast enough. That's Megabits per second. In actual Megabytes, that translates to 3-4MB/s read speed. Write speed will be even slower than that. The DVD read speed can get up to about 15MB/s at its fastest speed (12X)

The 360's hard drive will probably read at least at around 15-20MB/s or so (I'm basing that on actual transfer speeds for 2.5" sata drives on laptops I've seen. My 7200rpm 2.5" drive goes up to around 60MB/s, and around 40-50MB/s over USB, and my 5400rpm drives do around 20-30MB/s).

Are you talking about officially installing games or installing them on a modded 360? If the latter, then there's nothing stopping you trying it out yourself to see, as speedlolita's said about JTagging.

USB2's theoretical maximum speed is 480mb/s (60MB/s) whereas the sata interface on the 360 will do I think around 150MB/s max.

This relates to official 360, not modded 360.

I was just looking at a bog standard 360, with a crappy 5400prm HDD that they come with.

My understanding was that the read times when you install games to HDD are improved over DVD. I also believe the HDD that the 360 uses is not "Best of breed" and may only be a 5400RPM device.

So I thought the bottleneck would be the actual HDD istelf, rather than SATA databus.

We know that SSD is better for sequential read, but an ISO may require random reads, depending on how smart the developer was in building the DVD image.

So if you purchase a decent memory stick you are using the USB databus, which is significantly slower than SATA; but in my mind the Satabus isn't the bottleneck. It's the physical HDD that slows things down.

So....

A good USB pen drive may in my opinion, be somewhat faster than a crap HDD.

I have googled a bit and MajorNelsen writes;

http://majornelson.com/archive/2010/03/26/USB-Memory-Support-for-the-Xbox-360-coming-April-6th.aspx

Since performance on flash based USB storage is usually better, I highly recommend using flash based instead of spinning media like a hard drive?it?s just going to give you a MUCH better experience.

Mind you, he maybe wrong!

[MJ]

I haven't actually seen anywhere yet, where someone from Microsoft has officially said you will be able to install games to the USB device.

[randombs]

Yeah, you can't install to anything other than the stock hard drive on an unmodded 360.

I've heard stories of some installed PS3 games having issues such as streaming problems with 7200 rpm hard drives but don't have one (nor would I bother putting a 7200 rpm drive in one if I did) so didn't check up on it.

I don't think the 360 hard drives are crap per se, even if they are 5400rpm, but I wonder what drives they use in the 250gb models. I doubt they'd go 7200rpm as I don't think there's much point. While 7200rpm drives these days don't need more ventilation or the like, they're still more expensive than their 5400 rpm brethren. I wouldn't expect game loading speeds to be that much quicker as, like you've said, that depends on how the developer stored the data on the disc (and hence in the ISO for the game install).

I install my games before playing them so I can't really comment on load speeds as my experience of most will be purely hdd-based, but I found SF4 loads more quickly from the hard drive, as does Tekken 6, by quite a bit.

Has anyone done a speed comparison with a JTagged 360 to see the different speeds achieved? There are threads popping up now (I just Googled 'Jtag 7200').

As for Major Nelson's comment, call me cynical, but I just thought he's plugging the 360-branded Sandisk usb jobby they're going to release.

[anephric]

A lot of people seem to think you can greatly improve dashboard performance by keeping your profiles on memory card rather than on the HDD.

[EvilBoris]

I can't say I noticed a great deal of improvement just having my profile on the memory card, but when I removed the dash update from the HDD (avatar data etc)
and installed it onto the mem card instead I got noticable improvements as all the dash cache data is loaded from the mem card instead and all the lists and images load quicker.

The button press code to remove the update is X,LB,RB,X,LB,RB,X in the same place you used to do the cache delete.


I've bought a 2GB SONY USB stick for this very purpose (£2 in WHsmith) for this very purpose as it should look neater than my mem card.

edit. Apart from my £2 sony stick has a pish read/write speed

[eastyy]

hey thought i would post this here.....if i can put my stuff i downloaded off live on a usb stick can i back them up onto my pc ? save me having to download them again if anything goes pear shaped

[speedlolita]

A lot of people seem to think you can greatly improve dashboard performance by keeping your profiles on memory card rather than on the HDD.

What.

I just do it because I switch between JP and UK 360s.

[sj33]

I always assumed it loaded the profile into RAM anyway.

[randombs]

This is interesting. If I remove the update, will it go back to the blade dash or something?

@EvilBoris: Can you put the dash update on the 2gb stick already, or did you mean you've bought it in preparation for the April 6th update? I might pick up a 256mb memory card to test this out, but ideally I'd use a usb stick as it'll be so much cheaper.

[ChrisF]

I'd have thought USB would be faster... especially given experiences of using Speed Boost in Vista / Windows 7 etc...

[EvilBoris]

This is interesting. If I remove the update, will it go back to the blade dash or something?

@EvilBoris: Can you put the dash update on the 2gb stick already, or did you mean you've bought it in preparation for the April 6th update? I might pick up a 256mb memory card to test this out, but ideally I'd use a usb stick as it'll be so much cheaper.

I've not put it on my stick yet as you can't format them for 360, I tried it with a 256 card when i borrowed one