I'm looking to upgrade the 20GB hard drive on my original 360 to a higher capacity model. Seems like the only ones I'm finding online for a decent price are the generic models. How reliable are these, and are there any drawbacks to using them?
I'm looking to upgrade the 20GB hard drive on my original 360 to a higher capacity model. Seems like the only ones I'm finding online for a decent price are the generic models. How reliable are these, and are there any drawbacks to using them?
I don't know how reliable they are, but my guess is as reliable as any random hard drive you'd get for a PC.
Drawbacks... I think the only one is they lack the special partition that the official ones use to enable backwards compatibility with Xbox games. If you only care about 360 games, it should be fine.
There are some paranoid types who used to worry MS would detect and ban you for using them, but it never happened and is unlikely to start happening at this late date.
You can buy refurbed drives from Gamestop and the like for pretty cheap I thought. It's actually the same drive in both the original and slim 360, just a different enclosure.
I bought a 120GB secondhand HDD for a phat 360 then took it apart to put it in my slim. I think the the cost was about $35 for me, though I did buy it from a local place and not a GameStop.
They are just standard laptop sata drives with a special file system. They are most likely just as reliable as a cheap Western Digital hard drive is. If you want the original xbox compatibility you can download the compatibility pack and it will install itself to your hard drive.
Great! Thanks for the information guys.