Announcement: XB360 to have External USB HD Support
Published on Thursday, March 18 2010

Worried about not having enough hard drive space for your XB360? Worry no more! Microsoft has just announced that they will have external USB support for hard drives.

 
Details started to emerge from Joystiq and now those reports have been confirmed by two separate sources.
 
The document, authored by a senior software development engineer at Microsoft, states that due to "increased market penetration of high-capacity, high throughput USB mass storage devices, a 2010 Xbox 360 system update" will allow consumers to save and load game data from USB devices. The update is purportedly coming in Spring 2010.

Once the update occurs, Xbox 360 owners will be able to download Xbox Live Arcade games, Xbox Live Indie games, Games on Demand, DLC and Title Updates to the storage device. "USB storage devices may, however, have far greater memory capacity than MUs (at the date of writing, the largest MU is 512 MB), and may therefore support previously infeasible operations-such as installation of a full disc-based title." That's right, you can also store disc-based games to the USB device; however, it will require the disc to be in the tray for authentication, identical to the current functionality.

For some XB360 owners who got the Elite version for the nice size hard drives, might be kicking themselves right about now. One has to wonder why they didn't have the feature set at the get go but from a money making point of view, it does make sense.