Jump to content
OGXbox.com

Fitting as many games on a 1TB HDD


UserFriendly
 Share

Recommended Posts

Just to chip in. I am in a similar situation. Love modding and saving old consoles and just started looking at the pile of Xbox's I have and the bigger pile of 1tb hard drives. 

I'm currently waiting for the origins image to download as want to add a 2tb to my main Xbox and just found a green ltd edition 'which is what I bought on launch then stupidly sold' 

I was going to load it on then get deleting until it was down to 1tb then clone to a 1tb box but not sure if that's a good idea as may be messy leaving unneeded box art etc.

A new image is probably the way to go, like you I'm not especially worried about most emulation as I have 'or will have :) ' the original consoles but coin-ops is pretty. Also very unlikely to play sports titles.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/2/2022 at 6:48 AM, probablylost said:

Just to chip in. I am in a similar situation. Love modding and saving old consoles and just started looking at the pile of Xbox's I have and the bigger pile of 1tb hard drives. 

I'm currently waiting for the origins image to download as want to add a 2tb to my main Xbox and just found a green ltd edition 'which is what I bought on launch then stupidly sold' 

I was going to load it on then get deleting until it was down to 1tb then clone to a 1tb box but not sure if that's a good idea as may be messy leaving unneeded box art etc.

A new image is probably the way to go, like you I'm not especially worried about most emulation as I have 'or will have :) ' the original consoles but coin-ops is pretty. Also very unlikely to play sports titles.

 

 

First time around just installing everything yourself with a disk like OGXbox Installer isn't too hard and you get to decide what dashboards you want to have. I've actually never used any prebuilt images like Origins but if I am making one myself perhaps I should.

For emulation it's just a nice thing to have a box with a dedicated controller that is pretty versatile. Definitely just putting the big name consoles on there that are emulated well, not doing anything too obscure(for reference I am currently debating if I should even put TurboGrafx-16 on there, was just going to stick with Nintendo and Sega) . I need to do more research on the coin-ops/arcade emulators because I have 0 knowledge of those. There were some arcade collections for the Xbox and I am not sure if those would be better to use or to use the emulators. I definitely want to add those emulators as well if the Xbox collections were not great.

Edit:
On another note I would like to edit the first post in this to include the links and some more descriptions but I guess you can't edit your posts after a certain amount of time? I was not aware of this. The link in the 3rd post to the text list of games will be updated based on what I currently have sitting on a 1tb drive to gauge the space they games will take up.

Edit2:

I have also updated the google doc so that you can add comments!

Edited by UserFriendly
Grammar
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Question about the Midnight Club series. I was more of a Need For Speed guy so never really played this. Would having just Midnight Club 3 suffice for the game? I included all the Need For Speed games except the first underground because I feel like they each stand on their own. I did not include the first underground because of how inferior it is to Underground 2. Wondering about the relationship between Midnight Club II and Midnight Club III. Was Midnight Club III a better version of II or do both stand on their own? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, UserFriendly said:

Question about the Midnight Club series. I was more of a Need For Speed guy so never really played this. Would having just Midnight Club 3 suffice for the game? I included all the Need For Speed games except the first underground because I feel like they each stand on their own. I did not include the first underground because of how inferior it is to Underground 2. Wondering about the relationship between Midnight Club II and Midnight Club III. Was Midnight Club III a better version of II or do both stand on their own? 

NFSU2 fucking RULES. MC has crap physics.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Onaga said:

I can highly recommand Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition - Remix... forget about MC 1 & 2 if you don't really like the series but Dub Edition Remix is worth it...

I remember when we played the s*** out of this game. 100% worth it!

Thank you! At this point this is enough to take it off the list. I need to cut as much as I can right now.

Another two racing series I have come across with sequels were Project Gotham Racing and Rallisport Challenge. Are these sequels fine on their own or do their predecessors add enough to warrant keeping both.

Edited by UserFriendly
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

Just came across this post and I'm a bit on the same situation but I'm on the start point of having a huge selection (3TB aprox.) of redump games that I'm cutting by extract-iso tool and then 7zip them to cut even more space on my storage.

However, I have a bit of a dilemma and a thing I like to discuss with you guys (as you are in a similar situation), what are you doing with MULTI/EUR/USA releases?

I'm having a bit of trouble testing games one by one and it's gonna be like a lot of time consuming but dumping all the collection as I have it (or even doing a selection) is giving me headaches - is impossible to tell if the whole game will be work as it is (extracted by extract-iso) and I don't rely on those HDD ready collection ready to use (but also I can't rely on only extracting games as I've had some trouble with some PAL games already).

Is there any alternative to DVD2XBOX for PC? I would like to use ACL files that exists for some games, maybe I didn't researched deeply but cannot found a tool for that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 2/4/2022 at 5:47 PM, UserFriendly said:

I used a combination of Metacritic and Gamefaqs. Here is a link of the google sheets doc and the txt doc of the games I currently have as the "Top 323" That I have so far:

Google Sheets Doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pAWehUWFH4Ile26KSPYFiU6t1IPWM2PpOKxN3UO8lMc/edit?usp=sharing

Top Games so far: https://pastebin.com/iNxqX9FG

 

 

BTW, thank you very much for the GoogleSheet, it's serves me a lot as I did as you and took my selection from similar criteria as you using Metacritic, but having it all in one file is a big work. Want to ask, what does mean the colour code in games column? Thanks in advance!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

I have a 2tb with all Full USA set, Jap and PAL exclusives. EXCEPT all the Club Football games. They are all essentially the EXACT same game just based on a different team. 

I achieved this by using a combination of extracted folder style games and iso files. 

I used iso files for the games that do not play from HDD such as Harry Potter: POA and also for any games that had 100's of tiny files that were smaller than the hdd cluster size. These games extracted will take up a lot of extra space as each tiny file will take one entire hdd cluster. Packing it all into in iso eliminates that. 

The HDD ready torrent is very broken as a lot of games either give a dirty disk error later on in the game or just dont work. That set was the basis of my install and i ended up redownloading a LOT of the games so i would just avoid it from the start if i was you. I would recommend that anyone starting a build today use Cerbios as their xbox bios and to use FULL iso images (basically the Redump set with the Video partition removed, I believe there's an all in one tool coming that will help with that ;) ) this will ensure no dirty disc errors etc and should be the most economical when it come to using hdd space/clusters.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I to am in the process of trying to build a library I do have a 2 tb drive sad to read about the HDD ready files as I have almost finished the full set minus sports but I do like racing spent about 10 days slowly downloading them started to 7zip extract this morning from one of three external 500gb hard drives that I had dumped #-H on caught the fly lead the drive went to unallocated now 38% recovery but doesn’t look to promising looks like only the ones that were being extracted have a chance so look like I’m going to look in to the wink

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/2/2022 at 11:48 AM, probablylost said:

Just to chip in. I am in a similar situation. Love modding and saving old consoles and just started looking at the pile of Xbox's I have and the bigger pile of 1tb hard drives. 

I'm currently waiting for the origins image to download as want to add a 2tb to my main Xbox and just found a green ltd edition 'which is what I bought on launch then stupidly sold' 

I was going to load it on then get deleting until it was down to 1tb then clone to a 1tb box but not sure if that's a good idea as may be messy leaving unneeded box art etc.

A new image is probably the way to go, like you I'm not especially worried about most emulation as I have 'or will have :) ' the original consoles but coin-ops is pretty. Also very unlikely to play sports titles.

 

 

Personally wouldn't bother with the "Origins" build, I believe it was someone's project that was leaked before it was truly finished and the original guy then refused to release the finished image. I have also heard that its very difficult to customize if you were looking at having your own style skin. Origins itself is a very modified version of the original XBMC and its skin I believe, although could be wrong there. 

I think soon enough the "Recommended" bios will become Cerbios with all its lovely extra goodies. I will certainly be using it going forward for any future builds. Redump ISO files with the Video Partition removed seem to be the current favoured method for obtaining ISO "Backups" for use on a Cerbios enabled system. No risk of dirty disc error, no patching of games to make them run correctly on the hard drive and ISO files alsp result in a lot of wasted space being saved. A lot of xbox games have 100's or more tiny files that are all less than the standard cluster size on larger hdds. Every one of those files will take an ENTIRE cluster. ISO files being multiple gigs do not have that issue. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, nikeymikey said:

The HDD ready torrent is very broken as a lot of games either give a dirty disk error later on in the game or just dont work. That set was the basis of my install and i ended up redownloading a LOT of the games so i would just avoid it from the start if i was you. I would recommend that anyone starting a build today use Cerbios as their xbox bios and to use FULL iso images (basically the Redump set with the Video partition removed, I believe there's an all in one tool coming that will help with that ;) ) this will ensure no dirty disc errors etc and should be the most economical when it come to using hdd space/clusters.

How soon do you think that will be available. I was going to go home tonight and download the HDD ready pack and this has me changing my mind

Link to comment
Share on other sites

46 minutes ago, VanishedPants said:

How soon do you think that will be available. I was going to go home tonight and download the HDD ready pack and this has me changing my mind

TBH I don't know when its coming, i have seen it referenced multiple times in the Cerbios discord channel.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Since cerbios allows for up to 16TB HDDs, does that mean we could be waiting 10 or 15 minutes for everything to populate on a drive that full. To bring it back to the original topic of the thread. I can understand wanting a smaller drive to reduce the amount of boot time. But if cerbios has some tricks up its sleave to make this faster would make a larger drive easier to deal with.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, VanishedPants said:

Since cerbios allows for up to 16TB HDDs, does that mean we could be waiting 10 or 15 minutes for everything to populate on a drive that full. To bring it back to the original topic of the thread. I can understand wanting a smaller drive to reduce the amount of boot time. But if cerbios has some tricks up its sleave to make this faster would make a larger drive easier to deal with.

This is exactly what Iˋve been wondering.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 5/12/2022 at 7:30 PM, eden said:

Just came across this post and I'm a bit on the same situation but I'm on the start point of having a huge selection (3TB aprox.) of redump games that I'm cutting by extract-iso tool and then 7zip them to cut even more space on my storage.

However, I have a bit of a dilemma and a thing I like to discuss with you guys (as you are in a similar situation), what are you doing with MULTI/EUR/USA releases?

I'm having a bit of trouble testing games one by one and it's gonna be like a lot of time consuming but dumping all the collection as I have it (or even doing a selection) is giving me headaches - is impossible to tell if the whole game will be work as it is (extracted by extract-iso) and I don't rely on those HDD ready collection ready to use (but also I can't rely on only extracting games as I've had some trouble with some PAL games already).

Is there any alternative to DVD2XBOX for PC? I would like to use ACL files that exists for some games, maybe I didn't researched deeply but cannot found a tool for that.

I am using the HDD ready ones because that's what I have and I haven't really heard or read anything that makes any other option better than that. It seems there is no perfect solution to having all games work one way unless you go into the files yourself and fix what needs to be fixed. So far every game I have played using my HDD ready collection works. I am only doing NTSC games, no PAL or anything.

 

 

On 5/12/2022 at 7:47 PM, eden said:

BTW, thank you very much for the GoogleSheet, it's serves me a lot as I did as you and took my selection from similar criteria as you using Metacritic, but having it all in one file is a big work. Want to ask, what does mean the colour code in games column? Thanks in advance!

Color breaks down like this:
Green = Shoe in(both User and Critic scores are high)

Blue = at least one User or Critic score was very high and the other was also high (most likely taking this)

Yellow = Both User and Critic scores are mediocre. Taking these in a case by case basis based on popularity/genre. Example: if there are already a lot of games in this genre that are already in the running to be added then I probably won't add yellow games that have a lot of the same type of games that are Green or Blue

Orange =  User and Critic scores vary greatly. I will go through and manually decide if these games should be added or not

Red= trash, don't even bother.


I actually have a list of games that I decided to go with. These games coupled with some emulators and their full NA collections leave around 60gb of free space to work with so if someone wants to add some extra games they like that aren't on the list they can. Here is the current list I have:

https://pastebin.com/1009CtYa

The Excel sheet I have should also reflect this as well. The column labled "Used for 1tb image" has an X in it if the game is on the image. If the game is green or blue I have a comment as to the reason why it is not on the image. Usually this because it has a sequel that is a better version of the game, typically racing games or sports games:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pAWehUWFH4Ile26KSPYFiU6t1IPWM2PpOKxN3UO8lMc/edit#gid=0

 

  

On 6/9/2022 at 3:16 PM, VanishedPants said:

Since cerbios allows for up to 16TB HDDs, does that mean we could be waiting 10 or 15 minutes for everything to populate on a drive that full. To bring it back to the original topic of the thread. I can understand wanting a smaller drive to reduce the amount of boot time. But if cerbios has some tricks up its sleave to make this faster would make a larger drive easier to deal with.

The reason I am doing this has less to do with boot time and more to do with me having a cheap source of 1tb drives. I also don't like having the entire collection on a drive anyway so this is more for efficiency. I guess boot time could also fall under efficiency so that is also a bonus!

Edited by UserFriendly
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, UserFriendly said:

The reason I am doing this has less to do with boot time and more to do with me having a cheap source of 1tb drives. I also don't like having the entire collection on a drive anyway so this is more for efficiency. I guess boot time could also fall under efficiency so that is also a bonus!

I can completely understand the cheaper hard drives. Another aspect I thought of was just time in general. We only have so much time in a week. I think it would be near impossible to have memorable experiences with all 800 something games. It’s good to narrow down the list for that reason as well.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, UserFriendly said:

I am using the HDD ready ones because that's what I have and I haven't really heard or read anything that makes any other option better than that. It seems there is no perfect solution to having all games work one way unless you go into the files yourself and fix what needs to be fixed. So far every game I have played using my HDD ready collection works. I am only doing NTSC games, no PAL or anything.

 

 

Color breaks down like this:
Green = Shoe in(both User and Critic scores are high)

Blue = at least one User or Critic score was very high and the other was also high (most likely taking this)

Yellow = Both User and Critic scores are mediocre. Taking these in a case by case basis based on popularity/genre. Example: if there are already a lot of games in this genre that are already in the running to be added then I probably won't add yellow games that have a lot of the same type of games that are Green or Blue

Orange =  User and Critic scores vary greatly. I will go through and manually decide if these games should be added or not

Red= trash, don't even bother.


I actually have a list of games that I decided to go with. These games coupled with some emulators and their full NA collections leave around 60gb of free space to work with so if someone wants to add some extra games they like that aren't on the list they can. Here is the current list I have:

https://pastebin.com/1009CtYa

The Excel sheet I have should also reflect this as well. The column labled "Used for 1tb image" has an X in it if the game is on the image. If the game is green or blue I have a comment as to the reason why it is not on the image. Usually this because it has a sequel that is a better version of the game, typically racing games or sports games:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pAWehUWFH4Ile26KSPYFiU6t1IPWM2PpOKxN3UO8lMc/edit#gid=0

 

  

The reason I am doing this has less to do with boot time and more to do with me having a cheap source of 1tb drives. I also don't like having the entire collection on a drive anyway so this is more for efficiency. I guess boot time could also fall under efficiency so that is also a bonus!

100% guaranteed that some of those games from the HDD Ready set will give you issues in the future.  I can tell you this from experience, I had the whole set on a 2tb (minus all the Club Football games) and had dirty disc issues on a LOT of games. No amount of re ftp'ing to the box will ever fix them either as the files are broken. 

Edited by nikeymikey
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
On 6/9/2022 at 11:40 PM, nikeymikey said:

I think soon enough the "Recommended" bios will become Cerbios with all its lovely extra goodies. I will certainly be using it going forward for any future builds. Redump ISO files with the Video Partition removed seem to be the current favoured method for obtaining ISO "Backups" for use on a Cerbios enabled system. No risk of dirty disc error, no patching of games to make them run correctly on the hard drive and ISO files alsp result in a lot of wasted space being saved. A lot of xbox games have 100's or more tiny files that are all less than the standard cluster size on larger hdds. Every one of those files will take an ENTIRE cluster. ISO files being multiple gigs do not have that issue. 

Assuming these will still need v1.6 compatibility patches though? (just for 480p?)

 

Looking forward to the tool being available, or a new archive being made available with ROMs built (and patched if any are necessary) in that configuration...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/9/2022 at 11:21 AM, nikeymikey said:

I have a 2tb with all Full USA set, Jap and PAL exclusives. EXCEPT all the Club Football games. They are all essentially the EXACT same game just based on a different team. 

I achieved this by using a combination of extracted folder style games and iso files. 

I used iso files for the games that do not play from HDD such as Harry Potter: POA and also for any games that had 100's of tiny files that were smaller than the hdd cluster size. These games extracted will take up a lot of extra space as each tiny file will take one entire hdd cluster. Packing it all into in iso eliminates that. 

The HDD ready torrent is very broken as a lot of games either give a dirty disk error later on in the game or just dont work. That set was the basis of my install and i ended up redownloading a LOT of the games so i would just avoid it from the start if i was you. I would recommend that anyone starting a build today use Cerbios as their xbox bios and to use FULL iso images (basically the Redump set with the Video partition removed, I believe there's an all in one tool coming that will help with that ;) ) this will ensure no dirty disc errors etc and should be the most economical when it come to using hdd space/clusters.

In my case, I'm archiving all as 7z files through the process of ISO > extract > 7z (high level compression) and I'm saving a HUGE quantity of gigs in my backup HDD, so for the way to storing all these ISOs, compressed extracted games is my choice. My question is (as I didn't tested), is OK to re-convert to ISO my extracted library in case I need it because the game doesn't works or because the cluster size is not optimal for a particular game?

The reason I'm archiving all as extracted&compressed is the attached screenshot down below, from left to right:

  • Extracted size (GBs expected on XBOX HDD - without counting actual disk size caused by cluster)
  • 7z size (7z preset 9 with some adjustments)
  • Original Zip size for the redump file
  • % of space gainance Extracted vs OG Zipped ISO
  • % of space gainance 7Z vs OG Zipped ISO
  • % of space gainance 7Z vs Extracted

data.png

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

IIRC and I got it right, I remember something about it that was because the rebuilt iso wasn't 1:1 to the original so altering file distribution along ISO won't be valid in case you want to burn it to DVD but... no source and can't remember exactly 😔

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 10 months later...
On 6/9/2022 at 4:21 AM, nikeymikey said:

I have a 2tb with all Full USA set, Jap and PAL exclusives. EXCEPT all the Club Football games. They are all essentially the EXACT same game just based on a different team. 

I achieved this by using a combination of extracted folder style games and iso files. 

I used iso files for the games that do not play from HDD such as Harry Potter: POA and also for any games that had 100's of tiny files that were smaller than the hdd cluster size. These games extracted will take up a lot of extra space as each tiny file will take one entire hdd cluster. Packing it all into in iso eliminates that. 

The HDD ready torrent is very broken as a lot of games either give a dirty disk error later on in the game or just dont work. That set was the basis of my install and i ended up redownloading a LOT of the games so i would just avoid it from the start if i was you. I would recommend that anyone starting a build today use Cerbios as their xbox bios and to use FULL iso images (basically the Redump set with the Video partition removed, I believe there's an all in one tool coming that will help with that ;) ) this will ensure no dirty disc errors etc and should be the most economical when it come to using hdd space/clusters.

Do you happen to have a list of the games you installed using iso? I've got the HDD ready set and haven't run into any issues yet but would like to just go ahead and fix any games that may give me trouble in the future. Thanks!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

Board Life Status


Board startup date: April 23, 2017 12:45:48
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.