Apparently, Microsoft couldn't squeeze all the announcements they had into TGS and X06 in Barcelona, so they saved one for the X06 event going down in Korea. Trailing slides of 360 peripherals we've already seen -- like the Vision camera, wireless headset, wireless gaming receiver, and the 256MB Memory Unit -- was this shot of a 100GB hard drive, courtesy Korean gaming site Game Inside. While there is no mention of price for the unit, it is supposed to debut in March 2007. Though the images look legit, there doesn't appear to be any counterpart on Gamespot Korea's coverage of the presentation or the rest of the day's news.
Now the question becomes, will the new, larger hard drive come bundled with premium 360s? With Sony's PS3 units offering both 20GB and 60GB variations, and downloadable content becoming increasingly popular, it may be time for Microsoft to up the ante in drive capacity. Or it could be another expensive add-on, appealing to only the most hardcore gamers who've already filled their 20GB (more like 17GB actually) hard drives with horse armor, Madden training videos, and gamertag pics. With 100GB bare notebook drives going for as much as $200 nowadays -- and Microsoft's 20GB drive going for $100 -- this could be one pricey peripheral.
[Via Engadget]
(Page 1) Reader Comments
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If I am wrong, I'm wrong- but I'm just not sold on this at all.
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$200? Where are you buying your hard drives? 100GB 2.5 drives are around $100. Even 160GB drives are only $180.
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This is turning out to be a great pissing contest between MS and Sony.
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Someone i know who has one loves it. I can agree. I find myself deleting demos, but most of the time the ones I delete are ones that need to be deleted (rumble roses)
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the 256mb memory card is entirely legit. it's been known to be in the works for a while now. it sparked debates on whether or not that meant microsoft would increase the maximum memory usage for live arcade games.
otherwise i can totally understand your disbelief of that images legitmacy. the text looks out of place and fake. however, somebody may have altered the image just so a quick glance would reveal what it meant. ive seen it done on joystiq before where they add little captions like when they showed the wii's secret buttons and stuff.
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This one-upping each other will carry on and on and on.. oh and they'll be doing it with Apple in the Zune/iPod battle too. Play nicely children.
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That defeats the purpose of you having to go out and buy their proprietary HDD; otherwise, just put up with the hassles of deleting demos and videos after you're done with them.
360 is slowly turing into a franken-box 360 with add-ons up the wazoo..
WiFi
HDD
HD-DVD
... whats next? all proprietary spec, all in the name of offering 'choice' to the consumer.
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Dang, now I don't know what to do.
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If you download arcade games, eventually you will fill up the 13G available on the standard drive.
My question is will MS provide a way to transfer files from you old drive to your new one? Do you have to buy a memory card to do it, or will that even work for transfering arcade games?
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buy the 360. this story is still kinda iffy so dont rest your decision entriely on this. besides, could you really wait 5 months to get the console you want? well maybe if you wanted the ps3 you could but thats another story. but the 360 is here and emergence day is nigh. go for it.
and you people (term used loosely) should be happy that sony and Microsoft are constantly one-upping eachother. its what makes great products. look at the handheld market. nintendo kicked ass with gameboy for the longest time. eventually it got kinda outdated. gba, gba sp, neither brought anything great to the market. then sony goes and makes the psp and nintendo shells out the ds. what if sony never made the psp? would we have the lovable ds today? who knows. so embrace competition people, dont criticize it.
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yea i hear ya. the add ons are a bit much. It seems to me they realize their mistke for not includingit in the beginning. Og yeah..but..theyre giving people a better choice.
20.
I imiagine you could just DL them again. You already bought them, so you wont be charged to DL somehting you bought again. As long as your signed on under the profile you used to purchase you should be fine
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It is obvious MS didn't make the 360 very "future" proof so now they are paying the price.
The 360 seems is already outdated so now they are adding (what MS claims) "1080p capabilities" and now a bigger hard drive.
3-400 dollars later in add-ons Xbox 360 owners are gonna be kicking themselves for not getting a PS3 because they originally thought it was "overpriced".
The PS3 price seems better and better.
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The Xbox 360 HDD is not proprietary douche bag. The case that houses the HDD is proprietary but inside is a 2.5" SATA Drive
http://anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2610&p=5
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The fact that MS can send updates to the 360 OS to add features like 1080p and built their console so that it can accept HDDs of different sizes means it isn't future proof?
Wha?
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Yea if your a Sony die-hard fan! At least you can choose the upgrades with MS.
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Don't you mean more like 12GB? There is only 12 GB of usable space on the HDD, the rest is used for game updates, backwards compatability and game cacheing.
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HD space is only going to be an issue when stuff like Symphony of the Night starts rolling out that is going to take up hundreds of MB's and aren't deletable like demos.
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The 360 seems is already outdated so now they are adding (what MS claims) "1080p capabilities" and now a bigger hard drive.
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What a load of crap. What the hell do you call the updates? The simple fact that Microsoft has made the 360 updatable with firmware makes your comment as weak as Sony's claims that the future starts with them!
On a more tempermental tone, I echo the same sentiments posted before in regards to tranfering data and files. There had better be an easy way to do it, otherwise most people will just look at the 100g hdd and say "That's nice" and get back to thier gaming.
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is paying $100 for a 20GB HDD really an upgrade?
is paying $200 for an HD-DVD that just plays movies and upgrade?
is paying $50 dollars for a non-rechargable (unless you pay $15 for charge and play kit) controller an upgrade?
At least with the ps3's base unit you dont have to worry about all those extra costs, i mean "choices" and if you want more functionality, you dont even have to buy sony brand products.
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I agree competition is fantastic for gamers as we get better products and more choice.. but the problem here is that MS have the financial clout to keep hammering Sony until either Sony just give up or disappear altogether. Then we're left with MS pretty much having a monopoly just like they have with Windows. Nintendo have gone off in another direction so they're not really affected. It'll be interesting to see just how long MS shareholders will accept them losing money on the gaming division and also on the Zune with it's huge task of taking on the iPod.
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wat if i dont want an HDD..???..and just want to play games and grab a memory card..??
wat if i dont have a 1080p TV and dont wat HD-DVD movies..???
and wat if i just wanna use cheap ol batteries in my controller?
see where im going...???...
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Panasonic is Nintendo's hardware partner (same with GC); they probably had a say in axing the USB/HDD in favour of only SD card storage.
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I hope that MS eventually updates the Xbox: $300 for the current Premium system; $400 for a new version w/ larger hard drive (60GB like the devkits, or 1000GB like this pic) and maybe one more added feature (wi-fi support?).
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I find it hard to believe there isn't an alternative drive out there that could be used.
Also, Sony NEVER "promised" (which wouldn't set it in stone anyway) you didn't have to buy a Sony HDD to upgrade the PS3. Sony's middle name is proprietary, so don't get too excited.
It was a pain to use a non-Maxtor drive in the PS2's, so I don't see the PS3 being any more friendly.
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Sony officially said that they won't market hard drive and that you can't buy any laptop 2.5" SATA drive, if you want to upgrade. That's a real option, isn't it?
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EDITED: spelling...
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Castlevania: SOTN will probably be a lot smaller than you think. After all that music is converted to MP3 (probably WMA), you don't have a ton of data left.
In other news, I'll probably rebuy SOTN if it comes with all the missing stuff from the Saturn version.
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but what would 100GB do on Xbox? I mean if arcade games only take up 50MB max, and there is not OS to install programs onto, do they expect us to use 100GB worth of demos at any given point?
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Actually, there is no reason Castlevania:SOTN shouldn't fit on a 64MB memory card preferred for XBLA games. The original PS1 game was a bit under 500MB of disc space but 95% of that is uncompressed audio files and poorly compressed FMV. The entire game will easily fit in less than 100MB and under 64MB with some work. Just converting the audio to high bit-rate WMA would clip off about 350MB.
Mcuh like Resident Evil II, the game could have been ported to the N64 with good results but by the time 64MB carts became reasonably priced it was no longer of interest to Konami. Nowadays, of course, that kind of space is trivial.
In general, most PS1 games can be reworked to the XBLA environment without excessive size.
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Fry's will sell you a high-end 100GB 2.5" drive today for $160. I imagine Microsoft can do much better when purchasing in quantities of 100,000 at a time. On top of that, areal densities continue to improve and prices drop accordingly.
In all likelihood, MS will drop the price of the 20GB unit to around $65 and sell the larger capacity drive for around $150 or less. This lets the Core System buyers become big XBLA customers for less and the existing big spenders get the space they need to have all of their purchases immediately available.
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