Customer Reviews

Xbox 360 20GB Hard Drive

5 star:		(69)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

PROS:

- Owning a HDD allows you to download patches from Xbox Live to play original xboox games.

- Download game demos from Xbox Live Marketplace

- More storage than a memory card

CONS

- 20 GB* is actually 13GB. For some reason, MS has 7 GBs reserved on the HDD.

- 13 GB isnt very much when you consider game demos average about .5 GB to 1GB in size. If you're going to be downloading patches and add-ons for your games, as well as demos, that 13GB of storage is going to fill up sooner than you think.

If you've got a base XBox 360 core unit, you really need to find yourself a hard drive. The hard drive lets you save music, store games, download content, and even play old XBox games.

In the original XBox, every XBox unit had a built in hard drive. This was inconvenient for several reasons. First, there were people who never used it, but who had to pay for it anyway. Next, if your XBox died, it was a royal pain because the hard drive wasn't removable.

You could try to move items off your hard drive onto memory units, but many save games were simply too large to fit on a memory unit.

The XBox 360 has a great improvement - you can buy the XBox 360 with or without the hard drive. You can even buy the hard drive separate if you want to upgrade your XBox 360 later on. If your hard drive fries, you don't have to get an entire new XBox 360, you just buy a new hard drive. If your XBox 360 fries, you don't lose your information, you simply pop out the hard drive and plug it into a new XBox 360 unit.

The XBox 360 hard drive lets you download content from XBox Live onto it - this can include new maps for games, new levels, even songs and videos. You can store your own CDs on the unit, which is fantastic for playing your own soundtracks during games.

It even comes with a free copy of Hexic HD - a tetris-like game that is really quite addictive. You find it under the 'Xbox Live Arcade' menu choice. You don't need XBox Live to play it - it's fully playable when you are off line.

This really is a must-have for any XBox 360 gamer - highly recommended!

This thing works fine, is small, convenient, detachable. There are 3 problems I have:
1) too little memory and the 360 OS/dashboard takes up a ton of space.
2) overpriced for the amount of storage you get. you can find a 250GB+ external USB hard drive for this price or less. the price simply doesn't make sense.
3) I would have appreciated a USB port (as on an external USB hard drive) so I could hook it up to my PC to transfer files.

The 20GB hard drive is a must have if you own a 360. Besides saving a ton of music on it, you need it to save your games you play. You also need the hard drive if you want to play your old xbox games (along with having internet connection to download the emulator for the old games). Besides that, when you download Xbox live arcade games (some are just awesome and there are more great games being added) you need the hard drive to store it on.

It is also removable so if a buddy has a 360 you don't have to bring your system over, just the hard drive to access your content. One draw back about the hard drive is that you will only have about 13 GB that is usable, the other GB's are used for running the system etc etc. Which when you think about it isn't that much storage when your have a ton of game saves and download new Xbox live arcade games on...hopefully Microsoft will have bigger hard drives soon....

but it's probably not a perfect fit for everyone.
I bought the core Xbox 360 and worked off a memory card for a few months until my dad bought me the 20GB hard drive. So far, it's worked very well for me. I play a lot of RPGs, especially Oblivion, which takes up a fairly nice chunk of space for each save game. My dad and I also shared the same hard drive while I was at school. He used my Xbox when I wasn't home but my saves were still there from over the summer. So, we had two people playing and saving off the same hard drive, my dad was playing games like GRAW 1 and 2, Halo 2 and 3, and several others he rented or borrowed. I was playing Oblivion, Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, and Gears of War. The hard drive works great. It's never given me a problem and I've never had to delete games to have more room to save.
That being said, I don't use X-box Live. I don't download music, add ons, or demos. I don't put anything on my hard drive other than game saves and the occasional expansion pack upgrade, Oblivion: Game of the Year being the only one I have so far. If you're doing that I suggest spending $70 more on a bigger hard drive or you'll be very disappointed, fairly quickly. If it's in your budget to spend the extra money on the larger one then get it, you won't be disappointed in having the extra space, especially if you download extra content. But, having said that, the 20GB does what it's supposed to. I've never had it lose any of my saved content or purge any games or freeze on me (knock on wood) and that's what I expect out of the product. It delivers.

I purchased the hard drive for my son's Xbox 360. It works perfect. You definitely need a hard drive if you own a 360. You can download all these cool games.

First off the Xbox 360 hard drive really is the only way to go if you think about that fact that a 64mb memory unit will set you back 30 bucks and the hard drive is essentially 13GB...thats my problem though, they advertise it as 20 gigs but only 13 of it can be utilized. Although this is still more than enough space, 100 bucks for a 13 gig hard drive seems a bit much. This becomes even more of an issue if you load the beta test for Final Fantasy which utilizes 5 gigs of the hard drives space. Like I said its still an incredible value compared to the memory unit, and a must if you are an Xbox live player but it could have been a better value

I agree with other reviewers that the 360 Hard Drive is a "must-have item" for many gamers. However, I'm disappointed by the size of the drive. The 360 drive is only 20 GB, yet it costs $100. The unit price of the storage, at over $5 per gigabyte, is way too high. Typical laptop drives retail at under $2 per gigabyte.

Furthermore, the hard drive comes with some 8 GB of space occupied by various "metadata" that Microsoft pre-loads on the hard drive. You can NOT reclaim this space, unfortunately. The usable space limitation pushes the 12 GB of available capacity up to over $8 per gigabyte.

The drive is perfectly functional, but runs out of space if you decide to move your music collection to it (for play with the 360's media player) and save a few game demos. The MP3 encoder on the 360 rips CDs at 192kbps (rather than the industry standard quality of 128kbps), exaggerating the capacity problem.

What's more, the 360 struggles to play music from large playlists stored on its hard drive. I can stream music from my Mac with Connect360 and the 360 skips through the playlist of some 1652 items fluidly and without problem. Not the same on the 360, where substantially smaller playlists of 1,000 items or so run slowly, often with 10 or 15 second dead silences between songs.

This product leaves me feeling guilty, because I spent $100 for something not very good out of sheer necessity. If you buy this hard drive for music or game demos, you'll probably feel the same way.

Where are the GB's for this system. They claim it comes with 20 GB, which is quite small- but in all actuality it only comes with 10.3 available GB. They preload the unit with 3.7 GB of advertisements for X Box- which brings us to 14 GB total. Yep, that's a missing 6 GB. And, if you are unlucky enough to call 1-800-4-My-X Box about this problem; then, you will probably speak to someone who barely understands English and will tell you to return the item because it should have 20 GB. If you are lucky enough to reach someone in the States; then, they will tell you there is a tiny statement on the back of the box which says some space will not be available. Also, they will act like it is an "industry standard" to have lower available Gigabytes than what is posted. This is only half true. The "industry standard" they are speaking of is a translation issue which causes a 20 GB hard drive to read as an 18.4 GB hard drive- not a 14 GB hard drive. Furthermore, if you are lucky enough to reach someone in escalations by e-mailing their phantom VP of customer service they will inform you that the unit is only 17 GB, but they use 3 GB for a Flash Player and as a Game Cache- which is supposed to explain why it reads at 14 instead of 17; yet there is still a missing Gigabyte and a half. So, you decide if a 20 GB hard drive- which they claim is the same as any other computer hard drive- is worth $100.00 when the exact same hard drive can be purchased for under $50.00 without the X Box casing. In fact, if you bought this product and know what I am talking about I suggest you call their Escalations department at 425-421-5368 and speak with Lynne Johnson. The known issue with any 20 GB hard drive is that it reads at 18.4 GB- this one reads at 14 GB.

I recently bought an xbox 360 harddrive which i didn't have too much difficulty as some people report, but that could just be in Michigan, I do not know. This harddrive is a must have, if you don't, you'll be like me at first where you play your games and you can't same, then when you get far, you have to shut it off :(


This harddrive is 20gb but it saves 7gb for games, downloads, patches, xbox live...ect. I love my harddrive and felt really stupid not having one. Well anyways...the only problem I had with this harddrive was the fact that i had to wait just a little bit to find it, but believe me, it's worth the wait and money.