Xbox 360 to gain support for USB storage

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The Xbox 360 all but requires a hard drive to download games, patches, movies. Indeed, all the features of a modern console can become very dependent on having large amounts of memory. Microsoft has long required users to buy expensive and proprietary memory devices and hard drives, but documentation obtained by Joystiq shows that you may soon be able to use your own USB storage on the device.

Image courtesy Joystiq It's still not a perfect solution. If the data here is to be believed, and Joystiq is claiming it has been verified by two sources, you'll be able to use up to two devices, and up to 16GB of storage on each one. That means you'll max out at 32GB of storage, but you can use that storage for anything that you'd use the hard drive for. "USB storage devices may, however, have far greater memory capacity than [memory units] (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," the documentation says.

Joystiq guesses that with rumors and images of a slimmed down motherboard floating around the Internet, we may soon see a version of the system without slots for memory units at all. Whatever happens in the future, USB storage has become cheap; this news may cause a newfound interest in the Xbox 360 Arcade hardware.

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