The 360 HDD workaround: Buy spare drives

Gamers Reports has an eye-opening interview up with Aaron Greenberg, Microsoft‘s main man in Xbox marketing. In a somewhat twisted way, this next little bit of news can be interpreted as some really bad wording or an annoying fact of life.

Gamers Reports was talking to him about their new download service for movies and TV shows, known currently as the Xbox Live Video Marketplace.

When he was asked about the problems with storing all that data on the 360’s hard drive and the problems associated with managing the space, he essentially pointed out that the downloads you get aren’t meant to be kept permanently on the console. “The movies are designed so that you watch them and then delete them, so we figure those arenÂ’t really something thatÂ’s going to take up space,” he explains. “With TV shows, if you ever have to delete one, you can always re-download it again.” That doesn’t sound like a very good use of time, but assume that Xbox 360 fans will let that slide.

Here’s something that they probably will not enjoy reading, however. Gamers Reports asked Greenberg about the possibility of Microsoft working on bigger drives to avoid forcing users to delete stuff they like keeping on their Xbox 360. He didn’t specify any work on making drives with larger space, but he does essentially offer a workaround: buy more disk drives. To quote the interview:

I can tell you what people tell me they do to get around this. What they do is they put their Live account on a memory unit and then they have one hard drive that they put their games or related content on, and then they have another drive that they put their movies and TV on. So you know, this isnÂ’t ideal, but thereÂ’s some ways to work around that today. If you download the content on one hard drive, and save your Live account on the memory unit, you can still have your hard drives hold all the content.

If you already own multiple drives, this isn’t really problematic, but it isn’t the friendliest way of dealing with an important consumer worry, don’t you think?

Gamers Reports has an eye-opening interview up with Aaron Greenberg, Microsoft‘s main man in Xbox marketing. In a somewhat twisted way, this next little bit of news can be interpreted as some really bad wording or an annoying fact of life.

Gamers Reports was talking to him about their new download service for movies and TV shows, known currently as the Xbox Live Video Marketplace.

When he was asked about the problems with storing all that data on the 360’s hard drive and the problems associated with managing the space, he essentially pointed out that the downloads you get aren’t meant to be kept permanently on the console. “The movies are designed so that you watch them and then delete them, so we figure those arenÂ’t really something thatÂ’s going to take up space,” he explains. “With TV shows, if you ever have to delete one, you can always re-download it again.” That doesn’t sound like a very good use of time, but assume that Xbox 360 fans will let that slide.

Here’s something that they probably will not enjoy reading, however. Gamers Reports asked Greenberg about the possibility of Microsoft working on bigger drives to avoid forcing users to delete stuff they like keeping on their Xbox 360. He didn’t specify any work on making drives with larger space, but he does essentially offer a workaround: buy more disk drives. To quote the interview:

I can tell you what people tell me they do to get around this. What they do is they put their Live account on a memory unit and then they have one hard drive that they put their games or related content on, and then they have another drive that they put their movies and TV on. So you know, this isnÂ’t ideal, but thereÂ’s some ways to work around that today. If you download the content on one hard drive, and save your Live account on the memory unit, you can still have your hard drives hold all the content.

If you already own multiple drives, this isn’t really problematic, but it isn’t the friendliest way of dealing with an important consumer worry, don’t you think?