Xbox 360 Gaining 2TB Hard Drive Support

The Xbox 360 is still kicking in Microsoft's eyes, as the Big M announced a few upgrades to the last-gen system via the Major Nelson blog, including larger supported hard drives.

The biggest change in this update is the 360's new ability to support external hard drives up to 2TB in size. This will allow for many more Games with Gold to be downloaded and kept safely without having to delete other games we might not be done with in order to make room. 360 owners have been asking for expanded memory for a while now, so to finally get it is a major victory.

Another interesting feature is the removal of space reservation for Xbox 360 games. Before a game might say it's only taking up 5 GB of space, but more space would be "set aside" for save files and future DLC downloads. After this update if a game says it's taking up 5 GB, it's only taking up 5 GB.

This is a wonderful new feature for those in the last-gen, as shelf space is now becoming crowded with games for two different Xboxes and two different PlayStations. If we can condense some of those titles into digital games and store them on an external hard drive, we're all for it (though it's always nice to look at your physical collection of games). Of course then the problem become remembering what games are on what hard drives, or that too many hard drives will take up space too. The life of a video game enthusiast is rarely simple as you can never have too many games, whether digital or physical.

This new update will launch for Xbox Preview Program players soon, though a particular launch date was not mentioned in Major Nelson's blog post.