I am about to purchase an XBOX 360 to do some XNA development.  My question is simple - is the 20GB hard drive enough space to do development with XNA?  I am a hobbyist, just learning, and for now anyway, just doing simple 2D stuff.  But I know you have to load some extra software packages, etc. onto the 360.  Any recommendations?

Yes! More than enough.

I doubt this will apply to you anytime soon but the max game size you can send over to your Xbox 360 is 2 Gigabytes so you can have many games on your 20GB hard drive.

Keep in mind if you are planning on participating in the Xbox LIVE Community Games distribution thing coming later this year that the maximum size for those will be much smaller. According to the FAQ, it is believed to be around 150MB as a compressed ccgame package, the same size restriction placed on XBLA titles.Remember that's not the official, final limit, but I'd bet it is a close guess to keep these games on par (size wise) with XBLA titles.

Off with 20 GB is probably a good place to start considaring that your games are not superlarge yet.

You will also have the option of upgrading to the 120 GB for $179.99 (listed price on xbox.com) when the time comes.

On my 20GB hard drive:

I have every Rock Band song, Burnout 3 (Xbox original), about 25 XBLA games/demos, and various other things downloaded and I still have around 5GB free, which is plenty for the XNA development I've been doing.


I should expect Microsoft to either lower the 120GB HDD price or offer a larger drive, given the large drop in HDD prices since the Xbox 360 was released. I'm waiting until then to upgrade.

more than enough

i have 2 xbox originals , like 12 arcade games and some xna samples and it still has like 7-8 gigs free on my 20 gig drive

so you will have no problem at all with the 20 gigs drive.. more with the community arcade expected limit of 150 megs per game.. you have room for hundreds of games

I actually find the 20GB small. If you plan only to do XNA development on your 360 then you have plenty of space and no worries. However, I found quickly out that only 12-13GB of the 20GB is available when you receive the machine. The other day I downloaded the Free Halo 3 map pack and it was 500MB!

To put that in perspective, a number of game demos (about 500MB+), a number of map packs and some videos/music and before you know it your drive is full. I can always upgrade, but that would put me a hefty $180 back and the inconvenice of moving all my content over to the new drive (and at the moment the process is not perfect).

So what we should really address is, what else do you plan to use your Xbox 360 for?

leesiulung:

However, I found quickly out that only 12-13GB of the 20GB is available when you receive the machine.

That's partly because there's a bunch of crap demos and videos pre-loaded that you can delete and regain quite a bit of space.

 

David Hunt:

leesiulung:

However, I found quickly out that only 12-13GB of the 20GB is available when you receive the machine.

That's partly because there's a bunch of crap demos and videos pre-loaded that you can delete and regain quite a bit of space.

Like that 900MB Titanic video that came on mine. :-/

Microsoft has 7 Gigs of the 20 reserved for title updates and the backwards compatible feature. That's what I heard back at launch time.

my 20 gb hd without all that junk that came pre loaded had a capacity of 15 gigs

14.9 i think is the exact amount

my hd came with only 8 gigs left and with a lot of demos and videos in it preloaded.. i just got rid of everything except from hexic hd which was a full game instead of a demo ehehee