Xbox 360 Hard Drives - Could we get a price check?

There's pricing and then there's egregious pricing. It's plainly obvious to anyone who's ever used a computer that the Xbox 360 120GB Hard Drive upgrade kit could stand to have a better price point. Even the Xbox 360 60GB drive and the 512MB Memory Unit need price makeovers. Other blogs visited the topic almost a year ago, and since then prices have dropped -- just not nearly enough. A quick wander over to Best Buy shows the 120GB kit sitting pretty at $150, the 60GB drive lingers around $100, and the 512MB Memory Unit sits at $50.

Browse over to NewEgg and a conventional 120GB laptop drive now sits in the $45 price range. To be fair we should compare laptop drives with external enclosures to get a closer comparison, and even then we're only up to $70 and the drives are in the 250GB to 320GB range. The 500GB external laptop drives are $110. The pricing delta is even starker when we switch over to flash memory kits. You can easily find 8GB flash drives for $15, and 2GB flash drives go for as little as $5. Assuming we could divide up the 2GB flash drive into four equal parts, we're sitting $1.25 for 512MB. Microsoft's 512MB Memory Unit costs a meager forty times more than the going rate.

Come on, kicking up the hard drive size to 250GB or 320GB would probably make people happier, and at the same time not add much to the cost of the product. And who knows, if the Memory Unit cost $5 instead of $50, they might actually sell a truckload of them.