Sata Hard drive

po0k

Has anyone tried using a sata-pata adapter to use a sata drive in an xbox?
I'm looking at a 400Gig drive.

Armen Tanzarian

whats the point in trying to use an sata hdd in an xbox?, you wont see any benifits, a good way to empty ones wallet all the same. I got a 120 gb to start, ran out about a month later, then got a 350gb so I made a switch, got pissed off with an extra hdd hanging off it, so bought a wireless adaptor, and set up smb, you can integrate it with xbmc, and stream all your movies, music ect. off your pc. you'd be better off geting a big ide hdd and a wireless adaptor , and set up the network share with your pc, also you could then set up ics and streem live tv to your box all for a shed load less than the price of a big ass sata

Giblet

400 gigs sata though, I dunno if you can get that in IDE, or course I'm completely wrong but listen.

When you are partitioning that drive, put 200 gigs on F and 200 on G

Partitions with more than 250 start overwriting themselves.

po0k

Armen - trust me, there's a reason I want to do this.

I found the adapter I want.

Giblet - didn't know that, thanks :)

SouperComputer

Giblet wrote:

400 gigs sata though, I dunno if you can get that in IDE, or course I'm completely wrong but listen.

When you are partitioning that drive, put 200 gigs on F and 200 on G

Partitions with more than 250 start overwriting themselves.

is this an xbox specific thing, never heardn of that b4

Ciaran500

That would be a tight fit in the xbox case. The HDD tray would probably need to be cut.

Giblet

Yeh Xfat can only store up to 256 gig, but it doesn't chop off the rest, it just writes over itself at the start of the drive. Corruption happens.

po0k

Ciaran500 wrote:

That would be a tight fit in the xbox case. The HDD tray would probably need to be cut.

Yeah, I kinda figured.

The_Bullman

you could also mod the ide cable to allow you to add another 2 hard drives if you need 400 gigs of space

po0k

Aye, but I've never liked hot-swapping not-hot-swap components, much like I don't relish the idea of licking the gold fingers on DIMMs

silverlining

the fatx corruption problem can be fixed using this program (link to nfo file only)
http://www.xbins.org/nfo.php?file=xboxnfo1136.nfo

look under the 'formatting' section where it talks about using 32k clusters to fix the problem.

As for using the sata-pata adapter, it sounds like it should be okay as long as you dont try to lock the drive (no need with a chip I guess?)

po0k

Won't be locking the drive, and won't be going on Live! either.
KaiXLink all the way baby :)

silverlining

SyxPak wrote:

KaiXLink all the way baby :)

aye aye, pm me if you can host games, we only have 128kbps upload.

po0k

hehhe, same here

po0k

Apologies for ressurecting this thread, but I need to clarify something.

I'm about to order a 250 or 300gig hdd for my own XBox.
I was initially going to consider a 160Gig due to the FATX limitiation, but as I re-read this thread GIblet's post about the 256Gig limit struck me.
Is that 256Gig per partition or just 256Gig per device?

Also, is there any issue with using an ATA133-compatible drive?
I heard some mumblings that the Xbox IDE controller doesn't like them.
I'll be replacing the IDE cable in my Xbox too.

silverlining

The 256gig limit is a FATX partition size issue but apparently you can get around this by using XBpartitioner to format the partition. that nfo file I linkled to in my previous post reads:

Automatically uses 32k clusters when formatting > 256GB partitions.

The physical size limit is 2.2 Terabytes (and I thought that they were extinct)
In your case though you wont even need to use XBpartitioner as long as you format the drive for F and G support you can use the standard unleashx or evox formatting method.
oh yeah, 300gig definitely works

po0k

I'll just get a 250Gig drive. Won't need to store much on the xbox aside from a few 'choice' files.

The standard C: and E: partitions with F: taking up the slack should be fine.
I don't want to dick around with extra tools at the moment

Dan Dar3

Hi SyxPak,

Just wondering if you got a S-ATA drive and managed to fit in an IDE to S-ATA adapter in your XBox.

Rather than buying a new IDE HDD for my Xbox, I was thinking to move my Seagate 7200 200GB S-ATA drive from my desktop to the XBox.

Check out the Xbox Hard Drive Compatibility chart when choosing a HDD replacement for you Xbox: http://xboxdrives.x-pec.com/

Dan Dar3

Hi SyxPak,

The adapter you mentioned before is called IDE-SATA04 (JMicron 20330 chipset), and I could only find it in US and Taiwan:
http://www.cooldrives.com/native-sata-to-ide-adapter-with-jmicron-chip.html
http://www.ioi.com.tw/bridgeboards/ide-sata04.html

I found though the IDE-SATA01 (Marvell 88SA8040 chipset) - http://www.ioi.com.tw/bridgeboards/ide-sata01.html, in Germany for 29.90 Euro (a bit expensive, I'd say):
http://www.firewire-revolution.de/catalog/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=10&products_id=350

po0k

Thanks for that Dan
I installed a PATA 250Gig Samsung in my xbgox in the end.
The 400Gig sata I was talking about earlier didn't come through, and I'd have had to split things into an F: and a G: partition (FATX max partition size is 256Gigs)

Dan Dar3

Good for you, Syxpak
I'll probably end up doing the same thing eventually, although I'll probably look around for an adaptor for a while - whatever the adapter costs, I may end up loosing at selling my old S-ATA drive anyway, so the adapter doesn't look seems such a bad idea... for the moment :-)

Enjoy your box!