The Original Xbox launched in 2001 and it brought a few innovations never seen before to the video game console industry. The first would be a built-in hard drive that was not an optional add-on, rather it was a core component of the Xbox hardware. But did the hard drive provide any benefit other than large storage capacity for save games and custom soundtracks? In today’s episode we take a closer look at the Xbox hard drive feature and how developers took advantage of it in different ways. Was it really necessary in the end? You decide and let me know in the comments.
Sources/Credits:
► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJYsA1jXf60
► https://news.microsoft.com/2001/05/16/game-developers-challenged-to-utilize-full-potential-of-xbox/
► https://venturebeat.com/2011/11/14/making-of-the-xbox-1/view-all/
► https://games.slashdot.org/story/05/10/06/1922233/j-allard-responds-to-hard-drive-criticism
► Xbox Photo Credit: Evan Amos
Timestamps:
00:00 – 01:40 – Introduction
01:41 – 03:47 – The Xbox Hard Drive and its purpose.
03:48 – 05:23 – Save Games / Custom Soundtracks
05:24 – 07:21 – Developer benefits – Fast Loading
07:22 – 09:23 – Halo 2 caching and Doom 3 Texture Steaming
09:24 – 10:11 – Morrowind and the Hard Drive
10:48 – 12:28 – How the homebrew community adopted the Hard Drive
12:29 – 14:13 – The Xbox 360 took a step back
14:14 – 15:19 – Conclusion/Outro
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#Xbox #HDD
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37 comments
Copy all my CDs to the HDD when I was a kid
I used it for music, games like Forza would integrate your music into the game. It was also great for parties, i didn't need to drag my laptop out and risk spilling beer on it. The xbox was already connected to the stereo and i could play the saved music or any cd a friend brought over. I did use a switch box, so it wasnt hard to connect other devices if i needed to, but >90% of the music i listened to for years played off my xbox
Really eh main gripe about the original xbox was the controller. Remembe how many defended it cause tribalism. Then xbox shrinks all their controllers. 😂
Whenever I hear Xbox 360 I think of all the RRoD units I went through.
I remember my cousin and I kept copying and burning a CD music track to the hard drive. Until it was full. Because eight gigs back then was just crazy and we wanted to see how long it would take to fill it up. Definitely took a minute
Dumbest question ever.
"Custom soundtracks" the most unused feature put in a console. But don't talk bad about that big controller, it was awesome. I remember taking those hard drives out and replacing them with big 80-100GB drives and enjoying all the benefits that games like Mechassault had to offer 😉
Wellll, for teenage me it was for copying games to.
Man was the xbox easy to hack.
Add too heavy and too hot 🥵
"that god awful Duke Controller"
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The hard drive obviously made games harder shesh
God awful Duke controller?? How dare you! It is LEGENDARY!
My favorite part of the original Xbox was going into the video setting and setting it to the correct resolution for the TV it was plugged into and being hailed a hero by my friends.
My first experience with a ModBox was very similar to the first time I jailbroke a PSP. It completely changed the rules of engagement.
Custom soundtracks were so dope. Playing games like Burnout Revenge and Black with my own metal playlist on the back round was awesome.
OG Xbox and halo lan parties are a core memory for me. I was the one friend who had a hub and access to make my own Ethernet cables from my dad’s surplus stash. My other friend’s dad moved to another state when he turned 18 and left him the house. We wired up the entire house in separate bedrooms and got 16 people over to game regularly. Just a bunch of 16-18 year old nerds partying it up all day and night.
I had 2 Halo 2 consoles & a Mountain Dew console. They all had Samsung drives. I sold them when i moved 10 years ago. Everything was mint & in original boxes.
10:56 look how beautiful that screen is.
Why? Is it running an hd mod? What type TV is that?
A: porn.
It was used for holding my emulators and roms.
It's necessary! That's how i listened to the shrek Christmas album while playing MX Unleashed on its radio than allowed for local music.
Not available on any other system ? Hm, must have hallucinated having a PC back then.
Mostly save files if i remember correctly
i loved the duke.
big hands will do that to you.
used for ripping cd's
It was there to convince owners to buy a bigger one that was three times normal price just because MS wanted it to be.
What Peter Moore meant was they made a mistake by giving you a HDD to begin with.
They've realized there was no need for people to buy anything proprietary.
I LOVED playing my own music while i was gaming
We used to rip all our music cds to the xbox – paired with a 5.1 channel logitech, it powered many parties!
Why would someone ask that? Are you stupid? All those games have large capacity! If you got tons of games a size of a gig wont fit it!!
1 feature of the Xbox was you could put your cd onto the hard drive and build a library of music to play while playing games
I think you could listen to music while your were playing games.
I bought my Xbox from fountain gate
drive to carabian gardens and got it mod chipped
Then got a 200GB sata drive from scorptech and added that in
that might was playing emulators and tones of games
just about to add a 2tb drive to my xbox…
ITS A HARD DRIVE….NOT AAPENDIX….LOOK AT THE SONY PLAYSTAN 5
I am sorry but the Original Xbox shell is still the most badass of any Xbox so much so that I would love to put an AM5 motherboard with an AMD 7 7000X series CPU, a 4TB M.2 NVME SSD, 128GB of RAM, GeForce RTX 4000s series GPU, ARGB buttons, Top Logo, and ARGB light stripes edging the "X" shape into it and make it into some kinda of Limited Edition Xbox Anniversary Console
I made my own soundtracks and now in my mind the songs are forever linked to what I was playing at the time.
Og Xbox. GTA San Andreas. A radio station in the game would be our mp3 downloaded music we had downloaded to our internal hard drive. True story. 👍
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