Mopower

Seems logical to me. Those memory cards don't hold enough to be of any use for large game saves. I doubt it would have cost MS much more to make the hard drive removeable. That way people don't get screwed when they have to exchange their consoles. I bought an XBOX when KOTOR came out and after a week of playing the thing kept freezing up on me. I was 80% done with KOTOR. But lost it all because I had to exchange the system. I haven't picked up KOTOR since. So, any ideas why they didn't do it then and why they thought it was a good idea this time?

Draven

Considering that it was the first console (as far as I know) with a true hard drive in it, I don't think they were ready to take the next step to removable hard drives.

DJ_Longfellow

It was good this time so they could sell TWO different 360's. Plus, removeable is more portable if you want to bring your HD to a friends house....

Mopower

Well the PS2 had a removeable hard drive. It was relatively useless but it had the slot for it in the back. That came out before the XBOX.

lotsofdvds

The PS2 came out before the Xbox but the Hard Drive for it came out much later.

joshd2012

You have to remember, the Xbox was built with OTS computer parts. As soon as you start customizing the product, you add costs. It was probably a money issue.

Josh H

I'd say it was to keep cost down. I imagine small, removable hard drives cost a good bit more 4 years ago than they do today.

fujishig

I'm just surprised they didn't create some program to transfer files from one drive to the other over the network. Or to transfer stuff from memory cards to the new HD.

Of course, I also wonder why some game saves are not transferable to a memory card anyway, even though they are small enough to fit on one.

sniper308

By the way KOTOR had a number of glitches... was that the only game you had issues with? It might have been an issue with the game or a corrupt save game...

but like others said, I think it was due to the cost of removeable, external, smaller HDs at the time vs now.

Groucho

You seem to forget that the Xbox was built in 2001, not 2005. The bang for your buck on computer components has changed a lot since then.

Mopower

No.

Mopower

Yes, price must have been the issue. But the XBOX uses full size hard drives so all they would have to do is make a IDE adaptor to make it removeble.

Draven

Well, sure, but I still say it wasn't a logical step at that time.

Frankly, aside from the ability to upgrade to a larger drive down the road, I am not a user that needs a removable HD. I don't rip my CDs to my Xbox, I don't take it to other people's houses, etc.

I treated the HD in the original Xbox as a big fat internal memory card, which is what I think they intended it to be (with the whole music storage thing as somewhat of an side benefit.)

Michael Corvin

I still don't see the point in just taking the hard drive to a friends house. It isn't like you can hook two of them up to share data.

DealMan

I used to save games on my Sega Saturn and I never had a memory card. Is that an internal hard drive or just some smaller memory device?

jeffdsmith

Maybe to avoid problems like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/80491849@N00/
?

Joe Molotov

It had a battery back-up inside the system, similar to the old cartridge based games. I think it could store about 128k or so, but if the battery ever died all your save games were toast.