10,000rpm 360 Slim. Load times? What are load times? haha.

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fubar569

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I looked into hard drives for my 360. didn't want to shell out 130 for a MS one or anywhere upto 100 for a chinese one.

came across some interesting threads where people were flashing Some WD Scorpio Blue/Black drives for use in 360's (both regular & slim)

Well if the factory is using 5400rpm-ish drives and a 7200rpm drive is snappy...10k would be amazing. what would it take to shove a Velociraptor into one?

The answer is: a 12v feed, a fan, a razor, a bit of solder, and a little firmware trickery (the same software you use to flash the scorpios works on velociraptors too!)

The results: shaving an additional 5 or more seconds off my average load times compared to my old 20gb drive i had installed in my slim.

Since it is thicker you can't use the drive cage/case and it fits perfectly in the bay without it. You wouldn't want it in any sort of case anyway due to heat. the fan blows directly over the bare drive.

Give it a day and i'll have a somewhat decent writeup done. I only have a couple pics because most of it is already covered in the teardown and reassembly tutorials already widely available online.
 
I thought about putting one of my SSDs in my PS3 to see how much it'd help, lol. Would be cool if you could do the same with the 360.

I flashed my own BEVS drive on my 360 too back when the 120 GB HDDs were $150 from M$. I didn't even think about doing this or find anything during my research on it. Sounds cool though. Is it a 300 GB Raptor flashed to a 250 GB or a 150 GB flashed to a 120 GB? I might try this if I ever decide to take one of my raptors out of my desktop too. But I don't think I'd benefit much from it because most 360 games I play online where you have to wait for everyone else anyways. Still, it's cool nonetheless.
 
It is a 150gb flashed to a 120gb official drive. scored the drive here on the forums for 45 bucks to my door.

the only roadblock is the factory connector does not have a 12v power feed. you must solder a lead into the connector to power pins 13/14/15 on the SATA Power side. tap that lead into the DVD drive 12v line and reassemble using only the top half of the rubber boot for the connector. use a washer for a spacer on top and screw it back down with the torx screw. the Velociraptor slides right in the bay without a cage.

The difference 4,600rpm makes: Mass Effect 2 Load Times

disc one installed. all 5 free add-ons from cerberus network/xbl
all add-on content and save games stored on memory card
system caches cleared prior to loading game

mission: recruit the krogan

Velociraptor: 23.5s from hitting resume at main menu til shepard has weapon drawn.

stock 5400rpm 20gb: 28.7s for the same

Advantage: Velociraptor - 5.2s faster
 
not worth the trouble for 5.2 second and definately voiding a warranty
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
not worth the trouble for 5.2 second and definately voiding a warranty
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that was the only game i had installed across both drives and happened to be playing at the time. i'm sorry if you don't feel it's worth it however it is with games that traditionally access the DVD a lot and you then install the game to disc to cut load times. this improves it even further.

That 5.2 seconds was measured using a stopwatch app on droid and is entirely subjective. What it does prove is it's not a "placebo effect" and generally a ~20% speed increase is average. No caches were populated either as these were fresh installs and everything were flushed prior to loading the save. speeds could further improve over time. It also saves time during those game installs. they're PAINFULLY slow using the factory drive but take anywhere from 5 to 10min less (or more) using the velociraptor. In Game drive access seems smoother and there is less lag during any scene transitions.

I spend more time in my games and my gaming experience is proven to be superior. That's enough reason for me.
 
That's a considerable difference, not sure if it's significant enough for me to try it though. Maybe you'll see bigger gains on other games. Are you going to test a few more games? I'm assuming I'd have to solder the same lead I have 2x 300 GB raptors in my desktop, would I be able to pull one and make a 250 GB with one (I assume I'd just need the .bin of a legit 250 GB drive, right)?

I await more stats :).
 
yes. you would need to solder a 12v lead into the factory SATA Power connector. same principle. same pins. you can draw the 12v from anywhere but i chose the DVD power connector as it's proven and the pinout hasn't changed between the 360 and 360 slim.

yes. you can use HDDHACKR to flash your 300gb to a 250gb drive and it will work. the software is widely available and i can provide links if required.

I will try to test with other games. i have forza 3, FF13, black ops, ace combat 6 & MW2. FF13 and Forza are the best candidates to measure times s they have a lot of dvd drive access/loading periods.
 
What makes the Modern Warefare 2 edition 360 faster? I've been told (by someone selling one, so I took it as a grain of salt) that they have a faster processor then regular 360s. He claimed that he was able to download games to his hard drive 10 minutes faster with the same game (Black Ops) compared to his brother who has a regular 360.

Now I'm not expert on 360s, when I first read it I thought that he meant downloading from the WWW, thus using the same connection as his brother which means they probably did it at the same time and/or he may have done it during "slow" traffic where as his brother did it during peak hours.
 
Skillz said:
What makes the Modern Warefare 2 edition 360 faster? I've been told (by someone selling one, so I took it as a grain of salt) that they have a faster processor then regular 360s. He claimed that he was able to download games to his hard drive 10 minutes faster with the same game (Black Ops) compared to his brother who has a regular 360.

Now I'm not expert on 360s, when I first read it I thought that he meant downloading from the WWW, thus using the same connection as his brother which means they probably did it at the same time and/or he may have done it during "slow" traffic where as his brother did it during peak hours.
Click to expand...

All that any special edition 360's have been is a 250gb HDD, the game, headset, and a 2nd controller. No internal difference besides the HDD itself.
 
Skillz said:
What makes the Modern Warefare 2 edition 360 faster? I've been told (by someone selling one, so I took it as a grain of salt) that they have a faster processor then regular 360s. He claimed that he was able to download games to his hard drive 10 minutes faster with the same game (Black Ops) compared to his brother who has a regular 360.

Oh yea the modern warfare 2 360 has an elite processor, its top secret stuff, its a 7ghz spec ops intel cpu inside. Runs on 1.21 jiggawatts
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There's a huge difference between a 20GB 360 drive and a modern 500GB WD Scorpio Black. If you compared a modern 7,200 RPM and 10,000 RPM drive, you'd notice almost nothing in the 360.

So, point of this is, the heat, noise, cost, and effort for a 10,000 RPM isn't worth it, when a Scorpio 500GB would be perfect.
 
the downside to that is you are extremely limited with what you can do. to run anything other than what HDDHACKR supports you must JTAG your unit which means basically no more online play. I was not ready to live with that not to mention nothing after june 2k9 can be jtagged and certainly can't jtag a slim.

There are people reporting not much of a difference between a scorpio black and a scorpio blue or regular MS drive as far as load times in many installations. The difference here comes as a result of dramatically lower seek times (due to the increased rpms) as the interface is still limiting the drive to sata150 speeds.

is it worth it for everyone? certainly not. however the proof is there in front of me and it is a pretty dramatic difference in real world play.

Now would i do it again? probably not. a 250gb black would be perfect for almost everyone and require NO additional mods besides the HDDHACKR flash.
 
the VR's arent that loud, i have 2 of them in my other computer. but odds are the DVD drive is probably louder then the VR.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
the VR's arent that loud, i have 2 of them in my other computer. but odds are the DVD drive is probably louder then the VR.
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it's louder than the VR AND the 60mm fan combined. and next to an overclocked Q6600 @ 3.4ghz with a 120mm fan it's virtually silent. lol
 
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