Comments on: What good is an Xbox 360 download service when the 120GB hard drive costs $140?

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:58:56 +0000

I’m not a fanboy, in any situation I go for value, clearly best offered by Playstation in this round. Microsoft don’t even seem to be ashamed of being money-grubbing, let alone try to hide it, which its a high deterrent for me from just about all of their products.

By: Art

Art — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:06:58 +0000

wow you could not be more of a troll could you dan or should i say fanboy.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:20:12 +0000

Maybe they should have taken a leaf out of Sony’s book and not forced consumers to pay for that? Any idiot can format a drive, and as for the casing and product packaging, its highly unnecessary. It only needs to slide somewhere inside the machine, its not like some amazing peripheral sitting on top of the 360, its just a harddrive. But hey, I love Micro$oft.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:15:56 +0000

This is funny. If everyone had looked past the initial price of the Xbox 360, and realised they’d have to pay for just about everything extra and it HAS to be Microsoft branded, they would have payed a little more for a PS3 and not worried about nonsense like this. Bang any 2.5″ harddrive into the PS3 and its happy. Not Microsoft. You gotta pay for their harddrive (monopoly, anyone?) and the biggest they offer is only 120gb and outrageously priced. Good call on buying that 360, wasn’t it!

By: Miles

Miles — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:13:39 +0000

Doesn’t the damned thing have a USB port? Why don’t they simply USE THE DAMNED USB PORT FOR HARD DRIVES?? :P

USB 2.0 speeds aren’t really an issue in most circumstances (ie HD video downloads, music, etc) and the games can continue to reside on the much faster, proprietary, vendor-locked-in hard drive attachment that you spend an arm and a leg to purchase. :P Microsoft… Bah!

By: Machete

Machete — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:09:30 +0000

Ah, I swapped the 2 numbers; thanks for the catch!

By: steve

steve — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:21:01 +0000

Originally, when the 120GB upgrade kit came out it used Fujitsu MHW2120BH laptop drives. I’m not sure if Microsoft has changed suppliers since the last time I’ve check into this but, those drives have come down a bit in price. But, we need to remember everything that goes into the manufacture of the kit, custom molded plastic enclosure, custom SATA connector, product packaging and of course the custom partition and format of the drive itself – all of which increase the cost (also remember that the case and connectors are the same as the 20GB kit already in production). It would be interesting to see one of the tear down sites do a cost estimate on this thing. Doesn’t matter though Microsoft will continue to rip the consumer off with this as long as possible.

By: thebonafortuna

thebonafortuna — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:11:41 +0000

How about comparing it to the same 2.5 drives the PS3 uses? I upgraded mine to a 160 GB Western Digital for about $60 on NewEgg at least six months ago.

The system had some great software on it to make the process simple, too. Took three minutes to swap out the drive (fool proof process), and then just restored the OS to it and uploaded my saved content from a USB stick. Quick and easy. No proprietary garbage. Use the old drive now as a fail safe backup for my music collection after temporarily putting into an SATA enclouse and formatting as FAT32. Now its sitting in the WD 160 GB box protecting my music collection. Everyone wins, and cheaply too.

By: Charles

Charles — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:02:35 +0000

I’m not defending MS’ prices on HDD, because I agree that they are ridiculous, but comparing the prices of the 360 HDD (2.5″) with a 3.5″ drive is disingenuous.

By: TJ

TJ — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:29:14 +0000

Actually, the MS drive is $1.16/GB, which is even more ridiculous.

/MathNazi

By: Patrick

Patrick — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:23:53 +0000

PC’s for the WIN! (again)

By: Machete

Machete — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:23:11 +0000

Sure, 1TB for $77 ($0.08/GB) is great and all, but unless I’m mistaken, that’s for a 3.5″ drive and the 360 takes a 2.5″ drive. The largest available 2.5″ sata drive available to the general consumer is 500GB for $85. Even taking this into account, that’s twice the price of the 1TB 3.5″ drive ($0.17/gB). In comparison, MS wants $0.86/gB; unreasonable no matter how you slice it. But as long as there remains a market (i.e. people keep buying them) then MS has no reason to allow the use of standard, 2.5″ drives in their hardware.

By: Screen Sleuth

Screen Sleuth — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:15:29 +0000

If the download/purchase schemes get really hot, companies like GameStop will be in real trouble (not that they aren’t already).

And yes, XBox HD prices are outrageous.

1TB for $77? Seriously? Only a few years before 1TB HD on computers will be standard equipment, I suppose.