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Review : 120 Gig Hard Drive for Xbox 360
Yesterday I finally had enough of having to delete space and re-download TV shows and other content from Xbox Live every time I wanted to get something new. I took the plunge and blew $180 on the big 120 Gig Hard Drive for the Xbox 360. This is the same as the one that comes with the Xbox 360 Elite.
Space on my old 20-gig Hard Drive has become a premium commodity over time. Xbox Live arcade and additional content for games has been a bigger hit with me than i had expected. Each arcade game added up and they are now making games closer to the 150 meg file cap.
I also had to get Psychonauts again after I had given my disc copy to my friend BBQ as a welcome to Xbox 360 gift and by getting the downloaded Xbox Originals version of Fable I can give my disc copy to my girlfriend's friend for her upcoming birthday. A cool thing about Xbox Originals is that if you have a save file from the disc version of the game it will see the save file automatically. Psychonauts clocks in at 3.9 gigs and Fable is a hefty 3.2 Gigs. There is also an added convenience about not having to get up and swap out the disc. I know that sounds pretty lazy but it is a big boost for when your playing Xbox Live arcade titles with your friends. BBQ and I will quickly switch between Puzzle Fighter, Joust and Street Fighter II.
It also irked me that there was TV show episodes that I've purchased the rights to but I did not have the disk space to have a copy them on hand. There was that HD episode of Star Trek and the second season of The Venture Brothers that I got before the DVD came out as well as a few of my favorite episodes of South Park and Robot Chicken. I am currently at 8.4 Gigs and downloading more as I type this.
So I reached the tipping point and my annoyance at the 20 gig hard drive's inadequacies out weighed my love for 180 bucks.
Now the hard drive is pretty pricey at $180 but it is not a common PC size but a smaller notebook sized drive and it has to be faster than a standard drive. It is cheaper than portable hard drive based MP3 players.
The hardest part was getting the space plastic open and prying the goodness out of the blister pack. I never though I would be nostalgic about the days of stuff coming in cardboard boxes. The drive looks exactly the same as the 20 gig drive but there is a "1" in front of the "20" and it comes with a one-time data moving utility software disc and a pretty decent looking cable. I was struck by the brief but useful existence of the cable. I was going to use it once and then it was going to be discarded never to be used again.
I made sure to follow the instructions to the letter. With the old drive in place connected the new drive with the USB cable and I booted up to the data moving utility. It asked me if I wanted to proceed and then warned me that it was going to take and hour and twenty minutes to transfer everything.
This was a perfect amount of time to watch my DVD of King of Kong : A Fist Full of Quarters and play with my cats.
I then removed the utility disc and powered down the Xbox and swapped the hard drives. All the content that I had on the old drive worked without a hitch including the TV shows and games.
I am shocked at how slow it is to download a few TV shows in HD and while TV shows over Xbox Live is pretty cool I don't think that renting movies over Xbox Live is a realistic alternative to movies on optical disc. I've been downloading the Star Trek episode The Trouble with Tribbles all day long now and hopefully I'll be able to watch it tomorrow. With movie rentals it is faster to physically drive to to rental store, rent the movie and watch it a couple times before the Xbox Live rental is downloaded.
However I really got this drive so I can get all the demos, DLC expansion content, arcade games and XNA community games I want without having to figure out how I am going to delete enough room and wait for the stuff to re-download.
Basically I've been downloading stuff every moment since I completed the upgrade. This means all weekend long using the background downloading feature. I've been a little worried about this since the fan is still on but it is not as high as when they console is on and playing a game. Hopefully the Jasper based Xbox will be out soon. When I get my new Jasper powered Xbox Arcade I hope to just slap this bad boy and not have to worry excessively about my Xbox dying on me suddenly. Hopefully they might fix the horrible DRM issue of tying content to a specific console by the time that I upgrade to a new Xbox 360. I didn't want to wait for the upcoming 60-Gig hard drive to upgrade and then slowly run out of space. This is the hard drive that I am going to be using for my entire Xbox 360 playing lifetime.
Jake at April 7, 2008 
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Comments
I have an external USB Hard Drive for my Xbox 360, it is great for watching movies, listening to music and looking at photos.
A lot of articles online say you can't use a HDD over 4GB, this isn't true - I have found a 500GB HDD that works without any formatting or mucking about with settings.
Simply "plug and play"!
Posted by: Xbox 360 USB External Hard Drive at April 7, 2008 7:23 AM
I have an external USB hard drive as well but you can't use it from Xbox Originals, DLC content, game demos and video content from Marketplace. But they do kick butt when used with a PC and your Xbox
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at April 7, 2008 7:38 AM
Heh, £35 for an off-the-shelf WD laptop drive, and half an hour's messing around on xbins/scene, and I have a 120GB myself. Laughed when I saw one retail at £135 at HMV the other day, even $180 seems like daylight robbery to be honest.
Posted by: Alc at April 9, 2008 3:16 PM
