Xbox 360 to support USB flash memory

From the 6th of April, Xbox 360 owners will be able to use USB flash drives of between 1 -16GB to store profiles, game saves, demos and "more", Microsoft announced this morning. Xbox Live's Major Nelson said this:

"Once you take the system update on April 6th, you’ll be able to connect your USB flash drives to your console and head over to the memory section to configure your new storage device. You will then be able to configure how much storage to use on the device, up to 16 GB. The remaining space on the flash drive will be accessible by your PC or Mac."

He also goes on to say that USB hard drives will probably be supported, but will have the same 16GB limitation. They would suffer from slower performance compared to flash based media. You can have 2 devices connected to the console at a time, enabling up to 32GB of simultaneous storage.

We're cautiously optimistic about this news. It flies in the face of Microsoft's previous attempt at disallowing unofficial storage devices (see our earlier article). The 16GB limitation is understandable - they don't want to provide competition to their own 120GB (and upcoming 250GB) standalone hard drives.

They obviously had to listen to the growing discontent of Xbox users being forced to purchase Microsoft's own over-priced memory units. So thumbs up to Microsoft for doing something good for consumers.

Microsoft blocking unauthorized storage devices for Xbox 360

It has been reported that with the coming of next week's Xbox360 NXE update - also comes the disabling of unauthorised storage devices.
The news came directly from Xbox Live's Major Nelson:
http://majornelson.com/archive/2009/10/16/unauthorized-xbox-360-storage-devices.aspx

There is some confusion as to what this means for third party peripherals, like Datel's Max Memory (pictured) for example. And it seems for the moment that they are only going after unauthorised memory units and not harddrives.

I'm sure there are quite a few people out there who purchased units thinking that they would be 100% compatible with Microsoft's console when they bought them. Maybe Microsoft should look at re-adjusting their peripheral prices before banning non-official products.