Xbox 360 Hard Drive (20GB)

This is one purchase that is almost essential if you have a 360. It opens up so many more opportunities, especially through Xbox Live marketplace. The ability to download trailers and playable demos is a godsend, as is the ability to store music to listen to while you play.

If you had the old Xbox and still have some of the games, there is a good chance they'll work on the 360 with a hi-definition facelift. Again, you need the hard disk to do this.

The hard disk itself is laptop hardisk, repackaged to look like part of the console. They chose a laptop disk because of its smaller dimensions. Don't be fooled though, it may say 20 Gigabytes but you don't really have anywhere near 20 gig to play with. You'll start off with 12 or 13 gigabytes of free space. The rest is taken up by formatting, the emulation software for playing Xbox 1 games and a puzzle game called Hexic HD, which is actually quite addictive. Plus some decidedly average music tracks.

Its a must-have if you have a 360, but at more than £50 for a low capacity hard disk, it smacks as a bit of a rip-off. Especially when you can buy a 200 gigabyte PC hard drive for £70.

Having recently buying myself a Xbox 360 Core System for xmass, I decided to purchase myself a Wireless Network Adapter so I could hook up to Xbox Live and play with my friends on games such as Gears Of War, Fifa 07, Ridge Racer 6 ect.

As i did not have any previous knowledge of how Xbox Live works and how much it has to offer, i initially thought that i would not bother purchasing a HDD as you don't really need one for actually playing games.

However once i got hooked up and going on Live it soon becomes apparrent the Xbox Live has so much more to offer besides just playing games online. You have all types of other cool stuff at your finger tips.

To start with you have stuff like downloadable game content which gives you extra missions for games which you have already finnished, game demos for almost every game available for the 360 (a lot of which are free.) Movie and game trailers, gamer tags and dashboard themes. One of my favourites is Xbox Live Arcade for all your retro ganes such as Street Fighter II. The List of options is endless.

Of Course what all this means is that you're gonna require some extra storage for your 360 as the little 64mb memory card just isnt going to cover it & would get filled up in just a couple of downloads.

This is where the 360 Hard Drive comes into the picture. The device is quite compact considering how much memory its offering and slots nicely on top of your console without looking unsittely or out of place.

As i mentioned, the HDD is essential for downloading ingame content and Xbox Live Arcade games ect, but this is not all the HDD has to offer. As with the original Xbox HDD, the Xbox 360 HDD will also allow you to do lots of other cool stuff such as burning music cds onto your 360 which you can then setup your console to play your favourite music tracks as in game music instead of the annoying music tracks which game developers use in games. So i can race around a Ridge Racer 6 course to U2'S "I Will Fallow" or skate on Tony Hawks Project 8 to Chemical Brothers "Hey Boy, Hey Girl" instead of an annoying American "Punk By Numbers" group such as Sum 41 or Blink 182 (sorry dont mean to offend any fans, but not really my scene!)

The only dissapointing thing with this product was the fact that the capacity stated on the HDD is slightly missleading. Microsoft advertise this product as a 20GB HDD, in actuality the available capacity of the unit is only 13GB. I know what most people are thinking, but trust me its true. You see what Microsoft dont tell people is that out of the total 20GB on the HDD, roughly 7GB is required for the software required to emulate original Xbox games and various other in built functions of the unit. At first when i purchase the unit i thought mine was faulty, however upon contacting the seller it appears that this is the case with every unit (i even checked with my friends and his is the same.)

On the whole, the entire capacity issue isn't really a major deal as 13GB is still plently of space for what you need it for, it just would have been nice for Microsoft to be up front with us on exactly how much memory capactiy we would be getting which we can put to use. Its not like you can delete any of the applications which are pre-installed on the unit as they are essential for the unit to perform, however i think it would have got a lot less peoples backs up just being honest, still it is Microsoft so what can you expect.

To summerise the 360 HDD, it has all the memory which you require for downloading all the excellent content from Xbox Live and various other fun options, however just bear in mind the real usuable memory capacity. There are rumors that Microsoft may release a 60GB HDD which i would definitely be interested in. But for now this will do nicely.

Well i'm off to download the demo for Lego Star Wars II!!!

First of all I was tempted to give this less than 5 stars as its very expensive seeing that it is only 20GB, but the fact remains it is a must have accessory for the XBOX 360. The main reason to have the harddrive is back compatibility with a selected number of previous generation of xbox games such as Halo 2. Secondly its a must have for Xbox live. It is correct you don't need a hard drive for xbox live but you wont be able to download extra content, demos and movies. The game demos are usually around the 800MB mark which obviously is not going to fit on a memory card. Also you can store music on the harddrive to play back during games like on the previous Xbox