Hardware Slow Booting 360 Phat (HDD issue)

[Startropic1]

I have a black phat (Elite I guess) Xbox 360 console. I had a 20GB harddrive from my original standard white phat 360, which I swapped a 250GB harddrive into the existing enclosure. The problem is the console is rather slow to boot up. Games run fine any everything, it just takes several minutes to get to the dashboard and whatnot when I turn it on.

The problem is definitely with the harddrive, as the console boots up perfectly fine without the drive attached. I believe it boils down to the fact that there's supposed to be no such thing as a 250GB phat 360 harddrive. Thus, the existing enclosure, (which came from a 20GB drive--I'm sure this doesn't help the matter), is the likely causing a bottleneck in terms of HD read speed. What is the best option for using a 250GB harddrive with a phat 360 console? Should I just use an external USB enclosure?

 

[DinohScene]

I've got a 320 GB harddrive in mine, works like a charm.
It's just that particular harddrive which is bothering the console.

 

[ISO-Man]

Same as DinohScene, I have 500GB in mine and did use 250 before... Never had an issue. I did have a lag issue once and I had to redo the hdhackr bin process. Cleared it up. The issue was the partions did not take properly the first time (my fault). Did you try creating partition 2? This is where I screwed up and did not do it in the order of steps.

ISO-Man

 

[mechagouki]

The size of HDD is not limited by the hardware, and besides some Phat Elites were available with a 250GB drive from new ("Super Elites"). HDD size has always been controlled by
the 360's firmware, with external USB drives being limited to 32GB until very recently. You can put any size drive that has ever been available as a stock size in any enclosure.

However, only certain non-original drives function properly, there is a tutorial right here on GBATemp detailing how to complete the process completely: http://gbatemp.net/threads/tut-upgrading-your-360-hard-drive-for-cheap.350262/

In short, as others have mentioned, it's either a drive setup issue, or hardware incompatability: low-rpm drives can cause the console to run really slow.

 

[Startropic1]

I suspect the drive is failing. I had the drive out of the enclosure to check it, but the label doesn't say what RPM it is. I'm going to ensure I get a proper RPM drive the 2nd time around. I've heard that getting a ~7000 RPM drive could be too fast for the hardware and cause issues, is this true?

 

[DinohScene]

7.2k RPM harddrives are good.

Just be sure you're using a WD Scorpio Blue harddisk.
Those are the drives best suited for HDDHackr.