Microsoft to release a terabyte Xbox 360 hard drive?

One of the core arguments against the face value worth of the price of an Xbox 360 compared to a PS3, is the size of its hard drive. Nowadays, purchasing a brand new, entry point PlayStation 3 will ensure you get an 80GB hard drive inside the console, whereas purchasing a new Xbox 360 can start you off with a hard drive as small as 256MB (recently stealthily upgraded to 512MB). For those seeking to purchase a larger capacity Xbox 360 hard drive, a 120GB HDD will set them back around $199.95 RRP.

120GB is by no means a small hard drive, but when you consider that Microsoft has recently unveiled its Games on Demand feature (a feature that, as the name suggests, allows you to download Xbox 360 games), you don’t have to scan too far down the Xbox 360 game install size list to realise that games can range from a couple of gigabytes to over 20. Suddenly 120GB seems a whole lot smaller. According to Home Cinema Choice, a one terabyte hard drive is currently “in development for the next iteration of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console.”

The massive hard drive is said to be targeted for a 2010 release, alongside the upcoming Project Natal. While this would certainly solve the issues of storage space for the Xbox 360 owner seeking to make full use of the Games on Demand feature, we can’t help but wonder about the problems of pricing. Xbox 360 peripherals aren’t exactly cheap, and when you consider that a 120GB hard drive will set you back $199.95 RRP, a dollar per gigabyte translation for the possible price of a terabyte hard drive, puts it in the vicinity of $1,666.25 RRP. Obviously if such a hard drive proves to be true, then the price wouldn’t be quite that high, but one has to wonder about how Microsoft would get bang for their buck, while not setting a ridiculously high price on this particularly sizeable hardware upgrade.