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[Sean]

OK so you’ve heard a lot of buzz about this ‘ere Xbox® Hard Drive, but what is it exactly and why do I need one or want one?

Well let’s get clear first there are two topics covered by the term Xbox® hard drive. The first is the subject of upgrading or replacing the hard drive in an original Xbox® (or 360 I suppose) and the second topic is about buying an additional (or external) hard drive for your Xbox® or Xbox® 360.

The original Xbox® was shipped with either an 8GB Western Digital or 10GB Seagate hard drive, some lucky purchasers for a time were reporting to have received 20GB Seagate drives in their original Xbox®s but this is rumoured to only be because the 10GB Seagate drives were not available at the time of build so the next best unit was installed instead.

Since then clever tech guys have learned that you can upgrade your original Xbox® hard drive (Albeit probably voiding the warranty but if it’s over 12 months old then heck why not give it a go, if you’re brave, more details on that further in this site). Reports of Xbox® hard drives being upgraded to a whopping 2TB (yes 2 Terabytes that’s 2,000 Gigabytes!) capacity have been seen.

If you are the proud owner of an original Xbox® and you are about to go out and buy the latest generation Xbox® 360 (Arcade, Elite or Pro) then you will probably want to also invest in an Xbox® hard drive for it. This is because the majority of the original games for Xbox® were designed to run from the internal hard drive and without it they might not run on your new Xbox® 360, or not very well. In any event you will require a software emulator to run original Xbox® games on the Xbox® 360, to find one of these just search for it on Google there are loads of places to download it from. Check the Xbox® website for the full list of backwardly compatible games.

The reason for this is because hard drives run quicker than a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM or they enable the processor to process data more quickly because CD drive data access is quite slow compared to hard drive data access, and so by having the game code installed on the internal hard drive it meant that the game play would be quicker and smoother than if the Xbox® is constantly having to access the CD.

Also, because the game play code is vast these days, it is not always possible for the Xbox® to hold the entire game code in its internal memory (that’s the RAM if you’re interested in learning about this stuff!) so if there was no hard drive the Xbox® would quite often be constantly re-reading the same code from the CD which just isn’t very efficient computing.

The main advantages of having an external Xbox® hard drive are:-

Save your game progress.
Play most of the original Xbox® games
Download much more exclusive content
Store more music and audio files
Save your Xbox® 360 gamer card and gamer profile

The external hard drive actually fits inside the console. The Xbox® 360 hard drive enables you to do things with your console that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.