SATA Adaptor Compatibility thread

[Elurin]

I recently took my old Xbox out of storage for a final last upgrade, to make it more quiet and I also wanted a 2TB disk with a SATA interface.

I looked around and researched to find out which chips are the best in general and the consensus seems to be that the Marvell 88SA8052 are considered to be the best for these kind of converters. I stumbled upon the Delock Converter SATA > IDE which has the Marvell 88SA8052.

They are more expensive than the chinese stuff on ebay, mine cost 25 euro with shipping. But it has a jumper for Master/slave selection and more interestingly it has a HDD Led header which shows the HDD activity(none of the cheap ebay ones seem to have that). So I bought this one and attached a standard HDD LED I had left over from an old ATX case.

http://www.delock.de/produkte/S_61702/m ... anguage=en

For the disk I bought the SSHD Seagate Firecuda compute 2.5 inch 2TB with 8GB NAND flash buffer and this seems to work perfectly. This is a cheap way to get some SSD performance without buying a 2TB SSD

https://www.seagate.com/in/en/internal- ... /firecuda/

What is interesting is that after setting it up with Hexen and XBpartitioner the boot times seems to become lower and lower.

So at first it took about 18 seconds and it has settled down to about 10-11 seconds now. I think this is due to the NAND buffer, but I am not sure. It is interesting that during boot up the HDD led will activate after 3 seconds and is on full for about 5 seconds and seems to flash very fast after and will stop activity after booting has completed.

When using UnleashX as a dash it shows the Unleashx Splash screen after 5 seconds and takes another 5 seconds (with the HDD led on full) to fully boot.

[Marty]

For the disk I bought the SSHD Seagate Firecuda compute 2.5 inch 2TB with 8GB NAND flash buffer and this seems to work perfectly. This is a cheap way to get some SSD performance without buying a 2TB SSD

The Firecuda drives are 5400RPM...and the XBOX wouldn't know how to handle the NAND cache portion of the drive, so I suspect your perceived performance enhancements may be placebo.

[Tom M.]

I agree. As we all know Xbox is restricted to some basic PATA transfer rate (around 30-40 MB/s?). There is no advantage of using flash drive compared to mechanical drive as for the speed. Both my SSD and HDD run pretty much at the same speed performance. Someone on You Tube did some tests claiming Halo 2 is a tiny bit faster on SSD - well it that is true it must be related to dealing with large number of smaller files - but practically normal user won't even notice this. Flash drives are still preferred choice for Xbox since they are absolutely shake-proof which in case of a gaming console makes absolute sence.

[Elurin]

For the disk I bought the SSHD Seagate Firecuda compute 2.5 inch 2TB with 8GB NAND flash buffer and this seems to work perfectly. This is a cheap way to get some SSD performance without buying a 2TB SSD

The Firecuda drives are 5400RPM...and the XBOX wouldn't know how to handle the NAND cache portion of the drive, so I suspect your perceived performance enhancements may be placebo.

The NAND cache is transparent for the Host machine, this is all done by the firmware within the Seagate drive. So the Xbox does not need to know how to handle the NAND cache and it can't even see it.

You can look up Xbox 360 and PS4 loading benchmarks that show this drive does increase performance when loading the same files many times. It may be 5400RPM but it is fast enough to saturate ATA33 which is the max the Xbox can do anyway.

sequential read/write speed is not the only important factor, IOPS and latency also matter. SSD's and SSHD's are a lot faster in that department. You probably won't notice too much if at all in games.

[Grumpy Wolf]

How are people getting the kingwin adapter to work, there is no jumper on it to select the drive, I just keep getting stuck at the point where it tries to detect the drive.

[Excalibur007]

How are people getting the kingwin adapter to work, there is no jumper on it to select the drive, I just keep getting stuck at the point where it tries to detect the drive.

I could not get the Kingwin to work for me either. It gives an 07 error which I see means the drive isn't being detected quickly enough. However, today I got out one I bought years ago that never worked and I noticed some little holes to add header pins for a Master/Slave jumper. After adding header pins and a jumper, that one now works for me.

[scroeffie]

kingwin died for me today acting very wierd !!

[scroeffie]

For the disk I bought the SSHD Seagate Firecuda compute 2.5 inch 2TB with 8GB NAND flash buffer and this seems to work perfectly. This is a cheap way to get some SSD performance without buying a 2TB SSD

The Firecuda drives are 5400RPM...and the XBOX wouldn't know how to handle the NAND cache portion of the drive, so I suspect your perceived performance enhancements may be placebo.

The NAND cache is transparent for the Host machine, this is all done by the firmware within the Seagate drive. So the Xbox does not need to know how to handle the NAND cache and it can't even see it.

You can look up Xbox 360 and PS4 loading benchmarks that show this drive does increase performance when loading the same files many times. It may be 5400RPM but it is fast enough to saturate ATA33 which is the max the Xbox can do anyway.

sequential read/write speed is not the only important factor, IOPS and latency also matter. SSD's and SSHD's are a lot faster in that department. You probably won't notice too much if at all in games.

hey about your SSHD Seagate Firecuda can you post a video of a test your setup etc is it faster than a normal 2tb hdd with emulators coinops etc by faster i mean loading times ,feels more snappy etc etc

[Elurin]

hey about your SSHD Seagate Firecuda can you post a video of a test your setup etc is it faster than a normal 2tb hdd with emulators coinops etc by faster i mean loading times ,feels more snappy etc etc

Well it feels more snappy and it does load faster than a normal drive, but only stuff that has been loaded before like XBMC or Coinops. But the cache is only 8GB, so eventually it will replace data that has not been loaded in a while.

I have since moved to an SSD. This feels faster across the board. Although there is no bandwidth benefit, there is a huge benefit from reduced latency. File copying is also faster as well. When moving a large file from one partition to the next the Firecuda reaches 13MB/s while the SSD is over 15MB/s.