You can also rip more DVD’s and music to your console with Xbox® hard drives installed and you can setup in game playlists of your favourite music tracks. Currently the Xbox® hard drives are available in 20, 60 or 120GB varieties. I’m sure in time there will be higher capacity versions available and if Microsoft allow it, or can’t stop it, then other vendors will be providing Xbox® hard drives.
At the moment there is only the official Microsoft Xbox® hard drives available for the 360, although it is what might be considered an external hard drive, it actually fits internally in a neat removable drive bay slot. Quite possibly this could be Microsoft’s attempt to hamper other manufacturers from being able to easily offer their versions of the Xbox® hard drives.
As described earlier it is possible to replace the internal Xbox® hard drives on the launch version of the Xbox® consoles, although there is a bit of technical trickery to master before you attempt this, but once you have got the process licked you can upgrade the internal drive to a whopping 2TB (2,000 Gigabytes) capacity, which is a huge amount of storage, that’s .02 of a Petabyte in fact, it’s so large you can even reference it in the next unit up!
The process involves replacing the standard dashboard with a modified version (more on that later) and making the drive ‘lockable’ again. Apparently using a drive that is lockable is not entirely necessary in order to make it work, but essential if you want to play Xbox® 360 live games. Obviously the other thing you have to do is backup your current drive before you replace it with a new one! Again more on that later in the Xbox® hard drives upgrade section.