Xbox 360 gaining USB storage support in 2010 update

by Alexander Sliwinski

{ Mar 18th 2010 at 12:59PM }

Documentation obtained by Joystiq – and subsequently confirmed with two separate sources – reveals that “USB Mass Storage Device Support on Xbox 360″ will soon be a reality. The document, authored by a senior software development engineer at Microsoft, states that due to “increased market penetration of high-capacity, high throughput USB mass storage devices, a 2010 Xbox 360 system update” will allow consumers to save and load game data from USB devices.

Upon seeing the headline for this article I got really excited. The new Games OnDemand feature is cool, but without a robust storage solution it felt incomplete. Unfortunately, this is hardly a robust storage solution with a cap of 32GB storage.

There’s cool and then there’s cool but wildly strange. This would be the latter of the two. Even as the techie that I am, this strikes me as a bit strange. This is the bleeding edge technology that looks ridiculous now, but is a stepping stone to what will one day be a norm.

I’ve noticed more and more movies referencing Stanford which is pretty cool, and the latest, and perhaps most notable, is James Cameron’s “Avatar.” How many schools can say they’ve had a CGI blue alien/human hybrid synthetic lifeform wear their school colors? Yah Sigourney Weaver went to Stanford, so the film is biased, but if it wasn’t believable Cameron would have never had that in his film. Any true Entourage fan knows how anal James Cameron is when it comes to messing with his movies.

As a side note, did any other Entourage obsessors think about Aquaman at all while they were watching Avatar? My wife and I both couldn’t get it out of our heads, .

I like to refer to the Xbox as Microsoft’s white knight. It’s the only product they produce that I really think is good through and through(minus the red circle of death of course). The user interface is quite usable indeed, and it doesn’t try to do too much while still bridging many different media services.