My trusty, faithful Rachel holds all of my data and let's me play with her all the time. (Microsoft Xbox 360 Hard Drive 20 GB)

Member Name: katykicker

Product:	Microsoft Xbox 360 Hard Drive 20 GB
Date:	16/07/09 (52 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, clips in to the Xbox very simply, reasonable price, holds lots of data.

Disadvantages: None

The Xbox 360 is my favourite console of all time and for this reason I play lots of different games on it and download content from Xbox Live when I have access. I need lots of memory and so use the 20GB Hard Drive which is currently sufficient for storing the game data, music, videos, on-line content of myself and my fiancé.

You can either receive the 20GB Hard Drive with an Xbox 360 Console Premium (I paid £279.99 in December 2007 with 2 games but this is now available for around £150.00 or even less preowned) or you can purchase it separately from many different places, Amazon are currently selling it for roughly £35.00 (used from the marketplace) or check out Ebay and the like to pick up a great second hand deal. My personal recommendation would be to purchase it with the console as this works out cheaper than buying the Arcade console (which is being discontinued) and then purchasing the hard drive separately.

The hard drive is a dark grey colour with a silver strip on the top which says HDD and it is designed to just clip in to the top of the Xbox 360 console (when it's standing up) and it's very easy to put in place. Also, it can be removed so that you can take it to a friend or relatives and use it on their Xbox 360.

We have been using this hard drive for around 18 months now and have 12.2GB left and we have downloaded around 50 songs for Guitar Hero as well as backgrounds for the Xbox Dashboard & miscellaneous other photographs, videos & songs as well as game demos and trials of upcoming games.

This information is from Wikipedia & sums up how some of the 20GB is used: 'The total capacity of the Xbox 360 Hard Drive is either 20 GB, 60 GB, or 120 GB. Of this amount, approximately 6 GB is reserved for system use. Approximately 4 GB of that portion is reserved for game title caching and other hard drive-specific elements in games that support the hard drive, and an additional 2 GB is reserved for use by the Xbox 360 backwards-compatibility software.[12] This leaves users with approximately 14, 52 or 107 GB of free space on the drive. Depending on the market, the hard drive comes preloaded with content, such as videos and Live Arcade games or demos.'

Rachel (our hard drive) works very fast and never has any problems with freezing or slowly down much at all. It's quick & simple to load game data with just two presses of the controller and then Rachel will send all our data to whichever Xbox 360 game we happen to be playing that night. I like knowing that all our game data is kept safe & secure as I sometimes spend hours unlocking achievements on some of the more difficult games and the thought of having to do it all again is enough to make me cry with frustration! (Perhaps I shouldn't play the Xbox at all!).

I would definitely recommend a hard drive for anybody who wants to get the best out of the Xbox 360 experience but only the most seasoned gamers/downloaders would really require the 120GB so this is the one that I would recommend unless you are sure you are going to download a ton of content. The actual game data itself takes up a very small amount of space, 3MB for myself & 4MB for Tom at present so even without one of these you would manage providing you weren't going to downloading content.

I am going to rate this hard drive 5/5 as it's a fantastic purchase for most avid Xbox 360 players and I can't imagine our life without Rachel to play with now and again!

I don't find the 'noise' option to be relevant as the Xbox 360 is very noisy itself but the hard drive does not produce any noise that I am aware of, but then we have always had it attached to the Xbox.

Summary: A fantastic hard drive that works very well with no loading issues for me.

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