When i bought my 360 Pro it came with a free 20gb hardrive. But as soon as i turned on my xbox and checked the memory, it said it only had about 13-14gb free space! Even after i formatted it, nothing changed! Microsoft shouldnt be allowed to advertise 20gb hardrives when they are definitely no where near that big!
Well... they are 20 GB, if you were to remove the Drive and whipe it clean the real way not Microsoft way it would indeed be 20,000 MB give or take a few.
it has an operating system and spare space for games to load essential information for the game. Like halo 3, it "installs" some essential information onto the harddrive when the game starts up to help with load time.
I also had the same problem up until yesterday. Your hard drive already comes with a whole load of stuff on it, once you delete said stuff you should be able to open up some more space. For example I read that a guy had bought a 120gb hard drive and had the same problem with about 8-9gb "missing" but once he had deleted some already made themes, pictures etc. from the system, he got his hard drive up to 119.
Deleted some already downloaded demos and things like that should help. Let me know how it goes!
it has an operating system and spare space for games to load essential information for the game. Like halo 3, it "installs" some essential information onto the harddrive when the game starts up to help with load time.
SuperIntendent
If you took out the hard drive, your load times would be the same. It has nothing to do with storing game information.
I think the 20GB HDD has a usable 13.7GB actual. It's the same on PS3, I think my 60GB had an actual 55GB. Not really a problem if you bought an Elite but it does hurt if you only have the 20GB which my 360 does so I feel your pain.
1: It is very very very hard to make something have exactly a certain amount of space on it. The science of computer storage isn't the most concrete fields.
2: You could free up plenty of space. You just wouldn't be doing anything with it. Part of what takes up space on the HDD is the driver that lets the 360 use the HDD. Without that, you might as well plug a baloney into your 360 for all teh good it will do at storing save files. There are also themes, pictures, and sometimes demos pre-installed on your HDD. The same rings true fr things like iPods, mp3 players, and computers, in case you hadn't noticed :P
every single xbox 360 HDD is that way not just 20 GB. You can't complain about it since it came with files already installed inside to help operating your xbox360. I would not say it's a rip-off or something like that.
the space taken up is for the systems cache, and also for backwards compatability among other things hard drives being a few gig down on the advertised size when formated isnt anything abnromal. why not check out how many gig your pc hard drive says i bet its a few gig off the label when its formatted. amounts get rounded up to the nearest ten, plus file systems and file allocation tables can be quite big as well when drives get past a few gig no ones ripped you off, its par for the course for a hard drives, espieally one with part of a operating systems files on it. the reason you cant delete them is to protect to your system
All harddrives have a similarly deceptive labelling system. I have a 1TB harddrive that actually has 931GB. It's because they use a base of 1024 instead of 1000. 20GB formatted becomes about 18.7GB MS then takes about 5GB of space for operating system, drivers, system cache for storing game updates, but also a usable space for all games to temporarily copy files to use while playing. This was because it wasn't possible to install games until very recently.
Don't forget that a LOT of the space on the 19GB drive is game demos and videos that come on it. If you delete all of those, you can get MUCH closer to 20GB.
1: It is very very very hard to make something have exactly a certain amount of space on it. The science of computer storage isn't the most concrete fields.
2: You could free up plenty of space. You just wouldn't be doing anything with it. Part of what takes up space on the HDD is the driver that lets the 360 use the HDD. Without that, you might as well plug a baloney into your 360 for all teh good it will do at storing save files. There are also themes, pictures, and sometimes demos pre-installed on your HDD. The same rings true fr things like iPods, mp3 players, and computers, in case you hadn't noticed :P
chikinstien
link to baloney as 360 HDD how-to tutorial please!!!
:lol: jking
but yeah you should look for demos preinstalled in your HDD, maybe you have never notice them
Two things automatically "decrease" a hard drives size. All hard drives are like this, even computer ones.
1) Partitions - this takes up some space as they are essentially "walls" for data to be sectioned off. I am not sure, but I would imagine the 360 has partitions for different media types (gamesaves, demos, movies, etc).
2) Most specs use different specifications to measure size for advertising purposes and actual data. See Wikipedia for more info.
"2GB is reserved to increase overall system functionality, including things like the Xbox emulator - to enable backwards compatibility" "4GB is provided for game 'caching' or other hard drive-specific experiences developers want to build for their game"
it has an operating system and spare space for games to load essential information for the game. Like halo 3, it "installs" some essential information onto the harddrive when the game starts up to help with load time.
GodLovesDead
If you took out the hard drive, your load times would be the same. It has nothing to do with storing game information. Actually yes it does. Oblivion used this. Not all games do it because most games don't need. Halo 3 didn't need to, but for some completely stupid reason Bungie did.
Well you are getting 20GB, you are forgetting though that the xbox firmware takes up a few gigs of room, your not going to get a full 20GB, its the same with a computer, say you buy a computer with 80GB ram, and only have about 74-73GB actually usable to yourself, those gigs are used to install the software that is needed to make your system run, and just like a computer its going to use up space.
When i bought my 360 Pro it came with a free 20gb hardrive. But as soon as i turned on my xbox and checked the memory, it said it only had about 13-14gb free space! Even after i formatted it, nothing changed! Microsoft shouldnt be allowed to advertise 20gb hardrives when they are definitely no where near that big!m_j_skin
That s with any digital storage. It needs stuff on there to make it run when u reformatted it it deleted everything and put all the stuff that it needs right back. Its still a 20GB hdd if it was a 13GB Hdd ud only be able to use like 6GB. Im pretty sure it even says somewhere that although it is 20Jiggabites it needs 6 or zeven jigga bites to store things so u get to use less than the 20 jiggies for your self
When i bought my 360 Pro it came with a free 20gb hardrive. But as soon as i turned on my xbox and checked the memory, it said it only had about 13-14gb free space! Even after i formatted it, nothing changed! Microsoft shouldnt be allowed to advertise 20gb hardrives when they are definitely no where near that big!m_j_skin
I have a 20GB hard drive to and it did that. It made me pissed! and if youre a big DLC person like me you keep getting mad because you have like no space left
it has an operating system and spare space for games to load essential information for the game. Like halo 3, it "installs" some essential information onto the harddrive when the game starts up to help with load time.
Agent_Kaliaver
If you took out the hard drive, your load times would be the same. It has nothing to do with storing game information. Actually yes it does. Oblivion used this. Not all games do it because most games don't need. Halo 3 didn't need to, but for some completely stupid reason Bungie did. I am pretty sure Bungie did use this feature. I recently updated my Halo after the NXE and I got a message saying something about don't install the game onto the harddrive because it uses storage space memory to get faster load times.
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