If you've got a base XBox 360 core unit, you really need to find yourself a hard drive. The hard drive lets you save music, store games, download content, and even play old XBox games.

In the original XBox, every XBox unit had a built in hard drive. This was inconvenient for several reasons. First, there were people who never used it, but who had to pay for it anyway. Next, if your XBox died, it was a royal pain because the hard drive wasn't removable.

You could try to move items off your hard drive on to memory units, but many save games were simply too large to fit on a memory unit.

The XBox 360 has a great improvement - you can buy the XBox 360 with or without the hard drive. You can even buy the hard drive separate if you want to upgrade your XBox 360 later on. If your hard drive fries, you don't have to get an entire new XBox 360, you just buy a new hard drive. If your XBox 360 fries, you don't lose your information, you simply pop out the hard drive and plug it into a new XBox 360 unit.

The XBox 360 hard drive lets you download content from XBox Live onto it - this can include new maps for games, new levels, even songs and videos. You can store your own CDs on the unit, which is fantastic for playing your own soundtracks during games.

The XBox 360 even comes with a free copy of Hexic HD - a tetris-like game that is really quite addictive. You find it under the 'Xbox Live Arcade' menu choice. You don't need XBox Live to play it - it's fully playable when you are off line.

The XBox 360 hard drive really is a must-have for any XBox 360 gamer - highly recommended! In modern gaming it's almost a necessity, with the wealth of amazing songs, games and maps now available for download from the XBox Live system! I can't imagine not having one.

Rating: 5/5

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