It appears that the 120 Gig hard drive and the Elite are out in the wild. Yesterday Xbox-Scene linked to Llama.com’s tare down of the Elite. The llama’s were nice enough to gut the hard drive shell and reveal that it contained a Fujitsu MHW2120BH laptop hard drive. A quick Google search shows us that those drives are running around $100. That’s a bit cheaper then $179. Microsoft has defended their price by comparing the HDD add-on to self-powered external drives - I’m having trouble swallowing that.
Looking at a tare down AnandTech did of the original 20 Gig drive you can see the simple cable that connects the HDD (a common laptop hard drive) to the 360. Microsoft was kind enough to post the instructions for the HDD’s on their site. Looking closely we can see that the first step of installing or removing the drive is to shut down the console. Think about it this way - imagine your installing a hard drive in your laptop - you’d shut it down first - if you were using a self-powered external drive it would be at least USB so you could just plug it in. Now pretend that you ran a SATA cable out of your case and glued it to the top so you could simply plug in a drive. Starting to see the picture?
What Microsoft has created is simply a proprietary SATA to 360 connector, which is housed in a plastic shell with the hard drive. They then tried to convinced everyone that it’s the equivalent of an actual external hard drive. Which it’s not.
Maybe the extra cost is coming from the “transfer cable”…
Holding back free downloads on Live? Over priced song packs? Over charging for accessories? I’m starting to hate the way this is going…
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14 comments ↓
[...] out that the drive inside the plastic case is in fact a Fujitsu MHW2120BH 2.5″ laptop drive. Shindakun.net did some Google searching and discovered that these drives generally cost around $100. Not lengthy [...]
[...] out that the drive inside the plastic case is in fact a Fujitsu MHW2120BH 2.5″ laptop drive. Shindakun.net did some Google searching and discovered that these drives generally cost around $100. Not long [...]
[...] out that the drive inside the plastic case is in fact a Fujitsu MHW2120BH 2.5″ laptop drive. Shindakun.net did some Google search&hl=en&show=dd&scoring=p”>searching and discovered that [...]
LOL, great job. MS just got owned in the face for trying to rip us off. =D We need more people like you lol
[...] na Internet, Shindakun.net descobriu que esse mesmo HD é vendido a não mais do que [...]
You are a wrong idiot. While I do think that the drive is a tad bit expensive, it IS comparable to an external drive. As a matter of fact, it’s more comparable to an eSATA drive. SATA transfer speeds outside the case. It’s not important whether or not MS’s Xbox OS requires you to shut down the console first before you install the HDD. What’s important is that SATA on the Xbox is the SAME SATA on any computer which is PLUG AND PLAY. It doesn’t matter if it’s directly connected to the motherboard or otherwise (eSATA). So why don’t you just STFU and learn something about computers before you go posting BS on the internet.
End Rant
I’m basing my opinions off of what I’ve seen on the interwebs. The post is simply trying to illustrate a point - that the sum of the parts does not equal the price - in my eyes (and many others). I may be wrong (I can admit that) but, in the end the drive is over priced and I won’t be buying one.
Tell you what, why don’t you find me another 2.5″ eSATA 120GB HDD at all much less for 179, then we’ll talk. The 3.5″ ones are well into the 200s.
[...] out that the drive inside the plastic case is in fact a Fujitsu MHW2120BH 2.5″ laptop drive. Shindakun.net did some Google searching and discovered that these drives generally cost around $100. Not long [...]
Um, so you’re expecting a retail, boxed, xbox-branded, Microsoft-warrantied, Microsoft-phone-supported hard drive which comes with an enclosure and the transfer cable to cost about the same as a bare drive that you’d buy for OEM purposes?
$179 may be a bit steep, and god knows Microsoft doesn’t need any more money, but it’s a bit naive to act like this is a run of the mill, off-the-shelf hard drive.
hey xbox 360 cabinet why don’t you f*ing read, I said eSATA not SATA, retard.
You people are morons if you actually think this thing is worth $179 dollars. Its your money so keep getting ripped off. Geniuses!
Thank you for the informative article. We’re trying to do the trackbacks to your site now, but it’s not working as expected, so please accept this link instead
@Martin: In an effort to keep this “apples to apples” let’s say we want to use the exact same HDD as an external hard drive with USB 2.0 and eSATA interface. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817348022 The enclosure is running around $20.00 with shipping. And of course you must remember we are talking retail prices we will never know the actual cost per unit on the MS 120HDD all we can do is speculate… Thanks to TheSpecialist the debate is over now anyway it seems. http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEZZkAAAVVpHxXqpYb.php
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