Built-in HDD 'prematurely' killed off the original Xbox

70 bucks for an 8 gig?
Not even in 2001.

Damn the original Xbox is ugly.
I haven't seen one in awhile.

So why did MS make 360 SKUs that came with HDDs and not just make it an optional accessory.

If the HDD was too expensive they could have changed to a cheaper drive the same way they keep increasing the size of the 360HDD. An 8GB drive was probably pricey in 2004 as it was old, but they could easily have found cheaper drives.

I'm pretty sure the hard drive I replaced in my xbox was an 8 GB 5400 RPM drive. How could that have possibly been 70 bucks in 2004?

I couldn't imagine playing on a non-HD console now. The only reason i put up with the Wii is because of the must-have first-party titles.

And now MS is making a killing on the add on hard drives....I love my 360, but I hate that MS is charging so much for hard drives as I'd love to get a 120gb hdd.

The messed up part is MS would likely make more money from me if the drives were cheaper as I'd buy and rent more stuff from Live.

$70 for a 10Gb hard drive? MS wasn't getting much bang for it's buck. And here I thought they killed the Xbox because they wanted force fans to buy the Xbox 360.

The problem comes down to manufacturing guys. The CPU, GPU, Ram, and HDD in the original Xbox were all third party parts. Xbox only got better/cheaper/cooler chips when IBM and Nvidia decided to produce better/cheaper/cooler chips for microsoft.

The same applies to HDDs. Sadly, the 360 suffers the same syndrome of depending on third party for HDDs... except now it's external, so it can be changed. Imagine back in the original Xbox days, launch units being 10gb but current units being 40gb and neither unit doing anything special with the harddrive? Atleast with 360 there's plenty of DLC to fill them up. :)

You guys should read Opening the Xbox and The Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Very informative about the development of the original Xbox and the 360.

The problem comes down to manufacturing guys. The CPU, GPU, Ram, and HDD in the original Xbox were all third party parts. Xbox only got better/cheaper/cooler chips when IBM and Nvidia decided to produce better/cheaper/cooler chips for microsoft.

The same applies to HDDs. Sadly, the 360 suffers the same syndrome of depending on third party for HDDs... except now it's external, so it can be changed. Imagine back in the original Xbox days, launch units being 10gb but current units being 40gb and neither unit doing anything special with the harddrive? Atleast with 360 there's plenty of DLC to fill them up. :)

You guys should read Opening the Xbox and The Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Very informative about the development of the original Xbox and the 360.

Anyone who hires Peter Moore needs to put a 99-year NDA in front of him beforehand. He sure doesn't mind offering up inside info in exchange for news coverage.

"Maybe now with the 360's not so mandatory HDD, we'll see a console life cycle that'll last beyond five years. Maybe?"

Easily. We're at 3 already, nearly at 4 years, with announcements securing a solid year 4 as well...

Look, the most annoying thing about the 360 is the "Select storage device" question on almost all titles, and with some programs at EVERY save. That what comes from a completely optional HD.

Detect all devices then ask where to save if more than one seen? Nope, not these genius programmers. Totally lame, even IF Microsoft demanded it work that way for some idiotic 'user experience' thing..

Don't tell me lame stories about profit: the original Xbox WORKED because the HD was going to BE there if it worked at all.

The only way I see the harddrives being a significant cost is if they bought all 25 million of them in 2000. Seriously, the harddrive price dropped so fast that it alone could have allowed for significant price drops on the XBOX.

What likely happened is they had allocated a ton of cash for the HDD when the XBOX was first speced out and hadn't figured in price reductions. OR, they were stupid and got locked into a contract that had them buying 8GB HDDs for $70 at bulk in 2002-4.

http://www.alts.net/ns1625/winchest.html

This site gives you a chart of the history of hard drive costs. In 2001 $70 bucks would have been right. But in 2004, they were getting a bad deal. But who knows what other costs associated with the console were. Still all that hard drive was a waste at the time. Even now I prefer that a HDD is not a requirement. If it were, developers would be filling it up with mandatory installs like the PS3. I'd rather fill it up with the content I choose. In another 2 years I would be ready for a new XBOX, and hope they start thinking about going big with the hard drives if they really want DLC to become the future.

weren't the hdds of xbox security coded like the 360 hdds? that would explain the price.

i think you would of course save a grip of money by cutting the hdd out of some models. some people just want to play games they realized, and not fill a hard drive up with videos and dlc.

Wasnt the original xbox hdd 50gb i know mine is anyways

The hard drive itself didn't kill it. What killed it was Microsoft's insistence that every console had the same 8GB hard drive in it. (Later models had 10GB drives, but the Xbox still only allowed 8GB to be used; they just partitioned off a wasted 2GB area.) By end-of-cycle, you couldn't find an 8GB or 10GB hard drive retail anymore, but they were still paying through the nose to get them.

I would wager that's why the 20GB Pros were replaced with 60GB models -- it was probably getting more cost-effective to buy 60GB drives in bulk.

A mandatory hard drive isn't a bad thing. The smarter thing would be to let the general hard drive market play out, let the user swap out hard drives as needed. "Prepping" an Xbox 1 hard drive isn't difficult; you can find instructions on your favorite hacking site for partitioning, formatting, and locking it in just a few easy steps. It can't be that much more difficult to do for a 360 drive. Just add the special "format.com" and "fdisk.com" programs to the dashboard code. Let the user put in any hard drive they want, go to the system blade, select "Format drive", boom. Done.

I love my 360, but this is one area where the PS3 absolutely blows it away -- letting the user replace the hard drive with any size and model they want at the best price they can get.

I don't see microsoft moving away from the Xbox 360 for atleast another 2 years. The xbox 360 is very strong right now. Many great games are out there right now and look and work very well. And with the new dashboard, everything will be fresh for the users.

I wouldn't want to own a system without built-in storage. I do own a Wii, but at least that has some amount of flash storage on board, and with little online content to speak of (yeah, Nintendo, way to drop the ball there), the size doesn't really matter.

Microsoft made a bad move to not include an HDD in every system, in my opinion. If they're going to do that, then let us use any old USB flash drive (and throw in a couple more ports, while you're at it). That 512MB for $40-50 is just rubbish.

it wasn't the hd at all lol. thats an outright lie. Fact is the xbox original was not really a success at all.. It was a money dump to test MS's theory that it can buy itself into the industry. To which it has of course. MS knew it was going to lose alot of money on the original xbox but if they wanted to win they knew with time they could probably pull it off. Yes the parts were more expensive, they had less control over conditions because of the fact that they rushed certain elements onto the original. The processor itself was very very expensive too. Besides all these stated conditions the real 2 reasons why they did horrible with the original xbox was 1. It was the last in market. 2. No strong first party support. Ms has had to buy its talent and its internal development studio doesn't really exist.

As for the 360... It would have shared the same fate... Except for one very important decision. They rushed the crap outta of the system and threw all its support on it abandoning the original. Smart move.

Had it come after the ps3 and wii, even with strong 3 third party support the failure rate on the 360 would have all but ended all hope for the system. But since ms was first in the market this generation and managed to get a foothold. They hold the spot for now.

Last I heard it was all the nVidia chips where they were losing money (the contract for the chips didn't allow for the price to drop. The price paid in 2001 was the same price paid in 2004)

Microsoft - "We must sell these units at a loss, and then phase out the hardware because it is too expensive". Well that's silly.

There were two reasons I got an original Xbox, the HardDrive and Xbox Live. I played Halo 2 for the most part, and I feel like I got a lot of use out of the HDD and XBL, as Halo 2 had many downloadable maps.

The only other game I downloaded content for Was KOTOR. Everytime I would check the hard drive it would say 50,000 blocks free, so I don't think I ever got close to filling it up, even when I started putting music on it.

That being said, the 8GB hard drive holds XBMC with quite a lot of breathing room...

he hard drive and LIVE are the only thing that made the Xbox worth having. Try DLing a Halo 2 map onto a memory card.

Man, that sucks. I love my 360, but I honestly loved the original so much more.

They should have did what Sony did with the PS3...made the hard drive upgradeable and stuck with a cheaper drive with less memory.