A listing has appeared on GameStop for a 250GB hard drive (it’s a final listing, not a tentative pre-order), and it’s priced at $US130. That’s… exactly the same price as the larger, clunkier 250GB hard drives available for the older Xbox 360 consoles.
Sure, you get Hexic pre-installed, as well as demos for Peggle, Pinball FX and A Kingdom For Kefflings, but when you’re paying $US130 for a 250GB hard drive, that doesn’t even take a dollar’s worth of shock away from the total price.
A new system with a new design was a chance for Microsoft to move away from its diabolical pricing on accessories; the in-built wi-fi in the Xbox 360 S, for example, nullified the even more ridiculously-priced external wi-fi adaptor. Guess that’s about as far as Microsoft’s charity was willing to extend!
Steven Bogos
Saturday, August 21, 2010 at 2:22 PMI don’t understand, I thought that you could use any USB storage device with the xbox now? Why would anyone buy the overpriced official microsoft ones?
David Wildgoose
Saturday, August 21, 2010 at 2:55 PMBecause Microsoft restricts USB storage support to 16GB, even if the actual device is of a higher capacity.
weresmurf
Saturday, August 21, 2010 at 2:32 PMI’m not surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised.
Jehan Hapuarachchi
Saturday, August 21, 2010 at 3:32 PMWow…really?
Doug Sherry
Saturday, August 21, 2010 at 5:58 PMI just bought an the old-style 250GB HDD off ebay for $60
Bryan Lee
Saturday, August 21, 2010 at 10:11 PMI thought you could just open the HDD case & change it?
DKnight1000
Sunday, August 22, 2010 at 2:28 AMI beleive it’s a laptop 2.5″ drive but it’s specially formatted.
But yeah, for less than $100 (Aus) you can get 500gb to 1tb. Now in Australia we’re probaly paying $200 for 250gb. And they wonder why these things never sell. I would pay $100 for a 250gb HDD. And I know it’s a rip-off but I’d still do it.
DKnight1000
Sunday, August 22, 2010 at 2:41 AMCheck that, those prices would be for standard 3.5″ drives.
glennc
Sunday, August 22, 2010 at 11:51 PMthe problem is they are basically standard drives and there really is no way to hide the fact that ms are just ripping everyone off.
Nazxul360
Sunday, August 22, 2010 at 11:22 AMI think the MS hard drives have some special software or data pre-installed so that the console knows it’s official.
To do what you’re saying, you need to go to one of those Xbox hacking/modding sites and get the special software… even then I’m not sure what the exact procedure is… or if it’s even possible. And you still run the risk of Live thinking your console is illegally modified and banning it forever.
:(
Doug Sherry
Sunday, August 22, 2010 at 11:37 AMnah that’s a PS3 – the xbox will only take their own HDDs
Jason Oliver
Saturday, August 21, 2010 at 10:36 PMYou’d think they’d pack in something better than Hexic – I mean it was free – so I can’t complain – but then again it’s also boring as hell – so I will!
Adam
Monday, August 23, 2010 at 9:46 AMI’m pretty sure that if you use Test Disk on Linux which is a partition map recovery tool, you can write an xbox partition table to a generic 2.5″ drive and use that.