XBOX

[3pronghook]

Why would I need the 250gb vs 4gb? Would only be playing games. Xmas gift for kids.

[Jack Peterson]

Hard drive importance:

1. Current/Future downloadable games, movies, etc.

2. Many disk games require hard drive space, and it adds up quickly.

250gb is a massive amount of memory for a gaming console, but when you think about where what's going to be available in a year or two, you'll want the bigger hard drive.

I think my new PS3 has something like 320gb of memory, compared to like 40gb 4 years ago.

Times are changing.

[Jim Uran]

You can still order an external hardrive on the net for pretty cheap, they lock right into your 360 so no worries there. I ordered a 20gig for mine afterwards, plenty of space if you ask me. But more is better, that's for sure.

[Nick Kuhn]

If you buy games from the Live Arcade (and there's actually quite a few good titles there), 4GB won't be enough. Also, if you want to install the game to the HD to improve load times in the game you'll need a lot of space.

[Born2Fish]

I also heard that you can just go out and buy a flash drive for the new 4gb xbox. I believe they sell up to 16gb flash drives? And then you can use that on your xbox for more storage. They also do now sell the 250gb hard drive to put into your new 4gb xbox. But it costs around 130 bucks. Does not really seem worth it to me when you can just purchase some flash drives until the price of hard drives go down.

[Shack]

If you want to get funky you can just use your PC as storage and MS Media Center. The problem of this is most love the idea, but have no clue when it comes down to how to properly do it.

Ours is a 120g and I do clean it out every so often, but gamer info per game adds up depending on how many people are playing on the unit, how many different games they are playing and how many gamer tags are assigned. I also have about 10-20 music CD's stored on the unit to play music when I am playing. With that and two kids who have friends that come over and have accounts to play private matches and even public, given the removal of the preloaded carpware and about 5 different games the kids and I are playing (delete the stuff from over a year unless someone says they want it), I am running just over 20g with the music loaded. This also includes game data, Xbox Live software and on-line gaming updates and some other garbage.

4G would IMO just be enough for one user playing one game for a period of time, while using Live and stuff like streaming movies on Netflix and Zune. Or 4G would just be enough to get you hooked and looking to upgarde within a month or so and the warnings about storage overload start flashing. You crash, you lose everything and where you were on Live and in the real game. Not mention any downloaded purchased movies.

[3pronghook]

Good info! Thanks. looks like ive been convinced to spend the xtra $100 if i decide to pull the trigger.