Posted on June 4, 2010 - by Venik

Microbrain(tm)

When a few years ago I bought my Xbox 360, I had to shell out almost five hundred bucks. One of the extras I got was the 60Gb hard drive. Even by those times, charging a hundred dollars for what essentially is a standard 2.5″ SATA hard drive with special firmware was highway robbery. And to get it I had to drive from store to store for three hours before I finally tracked one down in an unlikely place: a local “Toys R Us”. This must have been the highest profit margin anyone has ever made selling outdated laptop hard drives.

When initially released, the Xbox 360 was available with a 20, 60, or 120Gb hard drive. Each hard drive cost about three times as much as an external USB 2.5″ hard drive of similar capacity and performance. Most of the Xbox 360s that hit the stores when the system was originally released had the 20Gb hard drives. Today most of these systems in use around the world still have a 20Gb disk. Once you realize that the system uses about 6Gb for game data and other internal needs and an average HD movie is more than 10Gb, you will understand the depth of Microsoft’s problem.

Even those like me, who decided to shell out extra for a larger hard drive, are not that much better off. A single game can take up over a gigabyte of space on the disk, even though it still requires the DVD to play. For example, Halo 3 requires about 1.5Gb of disk space and Forza III needs 2Gb. I have a bunch of games and a few episodes of House on my Xbox and that’s about all that I can fit onto the 60Gb disk. Upgrading the hard drive in the Xbox is not that complicated, but most people don’t know how and it still requires money. Your average Xbox owner is a teen with twenty bucks in his pocket, if that.

In the end Microsoft ended up screwing itself over. Most people who bought the 360, got it with the smallest disk available. Not necessarily because they did not want to spend the money, but simply because this is what they had on the shelves at most stores. Back then, with all the hype, you were lucky to find one at all. Now Microsoft wants it’s 360 customers to download video content. They even signed a deal with Netflix allowing Xbox users access to a vast video library. The problem is that very few 360 users have enough free disk space left to download anything in HD.

And so Microsoft found itself in a laughable position where the only obstacle to it’s ability to compete with PS3 in the online video rental market is it’s own legendary greediness. Microsoft chose to be shortsighted by forcing it’s customers to pay three times the market price for a small and outdated hard drive. And this tiny piece of late 1990s technology now stands in the way of Microsoft’s plans for world domination.

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