Xboxist

Microsoft Should Offer Bigger Hard Drives

A set rumors have appeared suggesting that Microsoft will phase out its Elite Xbox 360 bundle, in favor of more special limited edition releases like the recent red-colored Resident Evil 5 pack. That all sounds fine with us, as long as the company does one important thing: Increase the size of the hard drive in the 60 GB Pro system. With all of the great downloadable content currently clogging our limited sized hard drives, we really need a bigger option. Unfortunately, Microsoft has been incredibly stingy with their hard drive pricing, asking a ridiculous amount for the external 120 GB drive. In some places, it sells for over $120, when in reality (if we consider the price of PC hardware) it should go for less than $60. We say go ahead and drop the Elite bundle, but include a 120 GB drive in the Pro model for the same price. Better still, throw a 60 GB drive in the low-end Arcade pack and make everyone happy.

As many people have already pointed out, subsidizing the cost of hard drives makes a lot of sense. After all, we are filling our drives up with stuff we’ve bought from the Xbox marketplace. Furthermore, the more people with larger capacity drives, the more that developers can start to create bigger and better Xbox live downloadable games. Right now the size limit is capped around 150 MB, but there is no reason why digital downloads couldn’t get larger (except for the puny drives most of us have).