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No xbox 2 hard drive

Xbox

5th March 2004, 4:21pm
The rumours have now been semi-confirmed by a 3rd party memory manufacturer M-Systems: the Xbox 2 will *not* contain an internal hard drive. This will keep costs down for Microsoft, and may also allow them to keep the size of the machine also smaller.

In a move that many will say is simply to push exclusivity of these M-Systems memory cards (just who does use memory cards on their xbox (1) ?), it appears that these proprietry flash cards will be required to save any external data using the Xbox2.

In a recent interview at: Globes [online], the CEO Dov Moran was quoted:

Q: What’s happening with the contract with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) that you reported a week ago? How much money is involved?

”It’s a cooperation agreement. The potential isn’t clear, but it’s in the billions of dollars. Microsoft has taken the hard disk out of its Xbox. The only thing left will be a CD; that’s all. At some point, when users want to save their e-mail messages, copy music, or anything like that, the only storage they’ll have is what we give them. It’s worth hundreds of millions to the company, spread over a few years, and we’ll be the main supplier for it; and I hope the sole supplier. ”Meanwhile, development is intense, and requires expenses, although not major ones. We’ll start supply only in 2005.”

Gamebiz thoughts: It may not keep the hardware hacker too happy, but for those regular users it probably won't be a massive disadvantage. To some however, the recently announced lack of backward compatibility with Xbox(1) and now the lack of a hard drive, may give some slightly lower expectations for the Microsoft machine.
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by Gordon Craick