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Xbox One X Preorder Thread

nekkid

It doesn't matter who we are, what matters is our plan.
I’m guessing that there aren’t going to be any more Scorpio editions available to preorder from now then?

I’d go for it day one if I could get a Scorpio edition.

I'm probably going to cancel mine when the standard edition becomes available. So there's probably going to be some around.
 

Klocker

Member
I have a WD passport 1TB that's served me well but added a 2TB 7200 with external power, it seems faster or was I trading RPMs for storage for no reason?

I know USB 3 is the big speed increase but isn't 7200 even faster loading times?
 

jelly

Member
I found the first good photo of the Scorpio Special Edition on twitter just seconds ago!

DIuQIkSUIAAlWgP.jpg:large


From that photo the Special Edition looks good enough for me to keep the pre-order. Decision made!

Weird that you can't see the pattern at the top, sure it does right?
 

aaaaa0

Member
So I ended up grabbing one of these Seagate 8TB drives. I had to get it from Amazon though because I couldn't find an Australian seller.

I know it's powered with a wall socket. I'm wondering if anybody here has bought one and does it come with different fittings in the box for different countries like the WD ones do?

images

I'd be really wary of buying recent Seagate USB3 hard disks because you may be getting an SMR drive (Shingled Magnetic Recording).

SMR drives can lead to some weird performance characteristics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/shingled-magnetic-recoding-smr-101-basics,2-933.html
 

nillapuddin

Member
I found the first good photo of the Scorpio Special Edition on twitter just seconds ago!

DIuQIkSUIAAlWgP.jpg:large


From that photo the Special Edition looks good enough for me to keep the pre-order. Decision made!

I am so iffy on this or not, idk guys this is a 50/50 on getting returned to amazon as soon as i take it outta the box.
 
I found the first good photo of the Scorpio Special Edition on twitter just seconds ago!

DIuQIkSUIAAlWgP.jpg:large


From that photo the Special Edition looks good enough for me to keep the pre-order. Decision made!

I like the Xbox a lot more than the controller. That day one controller is dumb too. Would have preferred a unique color scheme vs the writing.
 

robotrock

Banned
any previews on the UHD bluray playback on this thing? I'm hoping it would be better than the S at that but I don't really know what to expect.
 
Thinking about getting the WD easystore external from Best Buy. I feel like the 2TB for $80 would be sufficient, but the 4TB is just $30 more....

I know we'll definitely need more than 1TB w/ the 4K texture packs, but you guys think 3TB would be sufficient? I realize this is a pretty subjective question, but 1TB has worked well for me so far FWIW.
 

aaaaa0

Member
I started reading the toms article, but that went way over my head. I guess we should avoid SMR though?

The basic deal with SMR is that it is a technology for mechanical hard disks that increases the amount of data you can store on a drive, by severely restricting how you can write to it.

A normal drive, you can write randomly at any block address (typically multiples of 512 bytes or 4096 bytes) on the drive.

By contrast, an SMR drive is internally broken down into 256 MB segments (which are called shingles), each of which you can only write sequentially, and you can only erase an entire 256 MB shingle at a time. By writing sequentially here's an example: Suppose I wrote 1024 bytes into an empty shingle. I can append another 1024 bytes to the shingle no problem. I can continue to append writes to the shingle until I've filled up the whole 256 MB. But I can't go back and modify anything I've already written without erasing the whole 256 MB shingle first.

By forcing the writes into these shingles, you can cram the bits closer together, which lets you put more data on the same sized platters, which makes the drives cheaper.

Unfortunately just about all modern OSes basically assume you can write to any address on the disk at any time, so in order to pretend that you can do this the drive has a complicated mechanism to remap addresses onto different 256 MB shingles, and then consolidate fragmented shingles when it needs to. (In some respects this actually resembles the way SSDs work.)

The consequence of this is that what the OS thinks is a contiguous chunk of files, can actually be horribly fragmented, which is important on a mechanical disk where seek times are huge compared to SSDs.

Another consequence is that any particular write on the disk can trigger a shingle consolidation pass (almost like an SSD garbage collection pass, which is normally mitigated by TRIM), which can cause write latency to become really inconsistent. One write might take 5ms, and the next one 500 ms (because the drive has to move a bunch of data around internally to rebalance the shingles and update its mapping tables).
 

Colbert

Banned
I thought settings were in the cloud? If not, where is the option to copy them? I don't recall.

atm there is no option to do this. Some settings are stored in the cloud that are tied to your gamertag but there are settings that are tied to the console. this all will be part of the UI update rolled out mid October with the Fall Creators Update or earlier.
 

E92 M3

Member
atm there is no option to do this. Some settings are stored in the cloud that are tied to your gamertag but there are settings that are tied to the console. this all will be part of the UI update rolled out mid October with the Fall Creators Update or earlier.

Thanks!
 
The basic deal with SMR is that it is a technology for mechanical hard disks that increases the amount of data you can store on a drive, by severely restricting how you can write to it.

A normal drive, you can write randomly at any block address (typically multiples of 512 bytes or 4096 bytes) on the drive.

By contrast, an SMR drive is internally broken down into 256 MB segments (which are called shingles), each of which you can only write sequentially, and you can only erase an entire 256 MB shingle at a time. By writing sequentially here's an example: Suppose I wrote 1024 bytes into an empty shingle. I can append another 1024 bytes to the shingle no problem. I can continue to append writes to the shingle until I've filled up the whole 256 MB. But I can't go back and modify anything I've already written without erasing the whole 256 MB shingle first.

By forcing the writes into these shingles, you can cram the bits closer together, which lets you put more data on the same sized platters, which makes the drives cheaper.

Unfortunately just about all modern OSes basically assume you can write to any address on the disk at any time, so in order to pretend that you can do this the drive has a complicated mechanism to remap addresses onto different 256 MB shingles, and then consolidate fragmented shingles when it needs to. (In some respects this actually resembles the way SSDs work.)

The consequence of this is that what the OS thinks is a contiguous chunk of files, can actually be horribly fragmented, which is important on a mechanical disk where seek times are huge compared to SSDs.

Another consequence is that any particular write on the disk can trigger a shingle consolidation pass (almost like an SSD garbage collection pass, which is normally mitigated by TRIM), which can cause write latency to become really inconsistent. One write might take 5ms, and the next one 500 ms (because the drive has to move a bunch of data around internally to rebalance the shingles and update its mapping tables).

Thanks, that was really informative. If I had some GAF gold I'd give it to you lol.
 

delroy

Neo Member
Does an external drive formatted for Xbox connect directly to a PC?

Or can we use edge on one and download content to external x1 drive?

Or will Xbox allow us to enable networking off PC? Or does it already?

From the panel, my understanding was that you could copy settings to an external USB drive and then plug/play into your new Xbox One, similar to how it works now with games. You can download the 4K packs, etc now to avoid doing that day one with the X to get you up and playing more quickly. The network option would be a situation where you have both an existing Xbox One and a new One X, and the X would be able to find the other Xbox on the network, and transfer settings/games via Ethernet cable/wifi.
 
Thinking about getting the WD easystore external from Best Buy. I feel like the 2TB for $80 would be sufficient, but the 4TB is just $30 more....

I know we'll definitely need more than 1TB w/ the 4K texture packs, but you guys think 3TB would be sufficient? I realize this is a pretty subjective question, but 1TB has worked well for me so far FWIW.

Personally, I'd spend the $30 more just for the piece of mind.
 

etta

my hard graphic balls
The basic deal with SMR is that it is a technology for mechanical hard disks that increases the amount of data you can store on a drive, by severely restricting how you can write to it.

A normal drive, you can write randomly at any block address (typically multiples of 512 bytes or 4096 bytes) on the drive.

By contrast, an SMR drive is internally broken down into 256 MB segments (which are called shingles), each of which you can only write sequentially, and you can only erase an entire 256 MB shingle at a time. By writing sequentially here's an example: Suppose I wrote 1024 bytes into an empty shingle. I can append another 1024 bytes to the shingle no problem. I can continue to append writes to the shingle until I've filled up the whole 256 MB. But I can't go back and modify anything I've already written without erasing the whole 256 MB shingle first.

By forcing the writes into these shingles, you can cram the bits closer together, which lets you put more data on the same sized platters, which makes the drives cheaper.

Unfortunately just about all modern OSes basically assume you can write to any address on the disk at any time, so in order to pretend that you can do this the drive has a complicated mechanism to remap addresses onto different 256 MB shingles, and then consolidate fragmented shingles when it needs to. (In some respects this actually resembles the way SSDs work.)

The consequence of this is that what the OS thinks is a contiguous chunk of files, can actually be horribly fragmented, which is important on a mechanical disk where seek times are huge compared to SSDs.

Another consequence is that any particular write on the disk can trigger a shingle consolidation pass (almost like an SSD garbage collection pass, which is normally mitigated by TRIM), which can cause write latency to become really inconsistent. One write might take 5ms, and the next one 500 ms (because the drive has to move a bunch of data around internally to rebalance the shingles and update its mapping tables).

Wait, so how can one tell which drive is SMR and which isn't?
 

Tall Paul

Member
any previews on the UHD bluray playback on this thing? I'm hoping it would be better than the S at that but I don't really know what to expect.
Hi bud, exact same drive is used in the X as found in the S, I stopped using my S for UHD as Family found it annoying to use so Went back to my Samsung, but the S has been well reviewed as performs as a good all round player.
 

Darklor01

Might need to stop sniffing glue
Hi bud, exact same drive is used in the X as found in the S, I stopped using my S for UHD as Family found it annoying to use so Went back to my Samsung, but the S has been well reviewed as performs as a good all round player.

Wouldn't the additional hardware power and features possibly assist with the UHD playback? Unless, of course it is the player software at fault for issues and if those issues remain not addressed, playback may be batter.
 

Tall Paul

Member
Wouldn't the additional hardware power and features possibly assist with the UHD playback? Unless, of course it is the player software at fault for issues and if those issues remain not addressed, playback may be batter.
Actually yeah that's a fair point, could be it loads slightly quicker, I haven't heard much talk of apps being optimised for X only games so may be a case of wait and see.
 

Hawk269

Member

That is such a fantastic feature for those upgrading to the Xbox One X. Nice and simple and the added feature of moving your settings over as well. But for me the biggest features is the ability to trigger the update for the enhanced games ahead of time.

I am just wondering how much in advance will they have the updates available? Even if the time is short, the fact we can download patches/updates before the release is such a great idea.
 

scently

Member
That is such a fantastic feature for those upgrading to the Xbox One X. Nice and simple and the added feature of moving your settings over as well. But for me the biggest features is the ability to trigger the update for the enhanced games ahead of time.

I am just wondering how much in advance will they have the updates available? Even if the time is short, the fact we can download patches/updates before the release is such a great idea.

Yeah. Everything MS seems to be doing with regards to the X1X is just so well thought out. The whole automatic downsampling, this, and other stuffs are just so good. Seriously, giving people the opportunity to get there updates done before the console arrives is really nice. Don't have an X1 so I can't take advantage of this, but its a great feature.
 

FN-2187

Member
any previews on the UHD bluray playback on this thing? I'm hoping it would be better than the S at that but I don't really know what to expect.

So what exactly is the problem with UHD discs on the S? I just started watching some over the past couple of days and they look and sound perfect. Have I just been lucky?
 

dEvAnGeL

Member
Preordered Scorpio edition.
Loved the texture on the console, didn't like the plain look on the regular one.
What texture? The only thing i can see different is the ugly green branding, unless i am missing something, this is the first time i am looking forward to buy the regular edition.
 

aaaaa0

Member
Wait, so how can one tell which drive is SMR and which isn't?

The problem is that Seagate hasn't been saying. You have to rely on people on the internet tearing apart USB hard drives and figuring out what actual hard disk is in it.
 
Want to get a new hard drive for the XBOX ONE X..I currently have a seagate 5TB expansion drive but its so noisy and besides want to get something larger since these games will take up so much space.any recommendations? Western Digital portable drives only go to 4TB so that is not enough
 
Want to get a new hard drive for the XBOX ONE X..I currently have a seagate 5TB expansion drive but its so noisy and besides want to get something larger since these games will take up so much space.any recommendations? Western Digital portable drives only go to 4TB so that is not enough

More quiet and more space?
What about a 24TB SSD?

Not yet on the market, but you can go with 8 so far
http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/novachips-4tb-8tb-ssd-review/
 
I know my portable western digital 4TB drive is super quiet but I need something larger than 4TB for the XBOX ONE X obviously..yeah 24TB I dont need THAT much space

Problem is i don't see any option
2.5 is 4 TB max
So anything above is 3.5 inch and louder.


So a high capacity enterprise ssd is maybe the only option for you. But that is expensive as hell
 
Problem is i don't see any option
2.5 is 4 TB max
So anything above is 3.5 inch and louder.


So a high capacity enterprise ssd is maybe the only option for you. But that is expensive as hell

Western Digital does have one of those desktop drives that are 8TB but am not sure how reliable they are for the XBOX..or if they give good speed on the games
Something like this for example
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-my-...-3-0-hard-drive-black/5605510.p?skuId=5605510
 
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