The 360 Hard Drive: Untapped Potential?

I'm not a tech-head, or fluent in electronic hardware, so please be nice...

Anyway, I have heard that the 360s hard drive is underutilized, in comparison to the PS3s.

I understand this is because the Arcade and Core 360 packages lacked a storage unit (besides the 512MB card for the Arcade).

I bring up this hard drive issue because I've heard somewhere before that if only Bioware had decided to use the 360s hard drive to cache textures... the game would have endured less texture pop-in and maybe even have loaded faster, as well as performer smoother.

The PS3, on the other hand, has games where files are sometimes installed for various reasons; like Devil May Cry 4 with slightly better load times.

Basically, I'm posting for two reasons.

1. Would the use of the 360s hard drive actually help in allowing games to become more polished and run much smoother?
2. If utilizing a hard drive does help the game, why don't developers just require a hard drive, like a disclaimer?

In my opinion, if a person didn't want to shell out an extra $100 for a hard drive, I doubt he/she really wants to game that bad (in regards to full retail games).

Although I do also understand that not everyone can afford a hard drive or a high priced configuration, if the hard drive does prove useful, it seems the 360 is giving the PS3 the upperhand and not pushing itself to its full potential.

well, yes, they could do that. it would however not be a requirement for games, so if the user did not have a HDD, the load times would not be as fast and the textures could take longer to load. They would not actually have to use the 360's limited HDD capacity, though. The 360 will accept any USB Storage device, so they could be used to store/install certain portions of games.

I highly doubt Microsoft would give the option of using an external HDD, though, as that would possibly result in them losing money by not selling as many hard drives.

However, the 360 does not need to install games, because even though it uses smaller media (capacity), it can read DVDs faster than the PS3 can read blu-ray. so really the 360 isnt 'lacking' anything from not installing games to the HDD, but the PS3 is compensating for it not being able to read blu-ray disks at any faster than (dont quote me on this, trying to recall from memory) about 2X, whereas the 360 can read at much higher speeds..

if developers required a hard drive to play their game they would basically be telling a group of 360 owners don't buy the game you dont have a hard drive.BlueCash

well, it is already starting to become a requirement for online use... (Burnout: Paradise), but seriously, who buys a 360 (arcade) and then spends $60 on a year of XBL?

well, it is already starting to become a requirement for online use... (Burnout: Paradise), but seriously, who buys a 360 (arcade) and then spends $60 on a year of XBL?

Agreed.

Like it or not, I believe hard drives are playing a pivotal role in the advancement of console gaming.

• Music
• Movies
• Downloadable Content
• Games

The hard drive allows consoles to center on more than just games, but while also expanding upon them.

Not every xbox has a hard-drive, which means games can not depend on the hard-drives for virtual memory (Page File) to be used as an extension to the console's RAM.

This of course is a descent size loss in performance.

Hopefully Microsoft won't make the same mistake on the next console. ;)

theys already a part of the hard drive for this. why do you think you get just under 14gb from a 20gb hard drive. alot of the games do have a cache area of the harddrive to use to speed up some games. and this just gets replaced by different games when they get played that use it to cache files.djrobst

Approximately 4GB of space is reserved for caching, while the other 2GB is for the backwards compatibility software.

I for one am rather glad I don't have to "install" games before playing them like some of the PS3 games. Though the texture popin in Mass Effect was just rediculous....