In a big announcement at E3 today we saw the new Xbox 360 Slim looking all shiny and black coming with wireless N, 250 Gb HDD and a much smaller case. It is available now for all those gamers looking for new hardware but in a look behind the scenes Aaron Greenberg showed how the HDD worked. The HDD on the new system is completely different than the previous iterations and is not a normal laptop HDD that can be easily removed via a bay in the back of the system. Aaron also showed the interface for the Kinect on the back of the system.

What does this mean for gamers? You will not be able to switch out your HDD easily and upgrade to a 1 Tb drive or bigger without buying it directly from Microsoft. The big HDD is cool but it is a bit of a shame that they went the propietary route and did not leave it as a normal laptop HDD like the Playstation 3.

We will be trying to get more specs and hands on with it shortly so stay tuned for more info.

http://dualshockers.com/2010/06/14/xbox-360-slim-propietary-hdd/

how will old 360 gamers tranfer copy protected games over if they buy the new one?

Like usual? Isn't there a software to do that anyways? To transfer licenses, it's on the Xbox site.

does this use the same HDD as current xboxes?

oooo so the new HDD is gonna cost more than the usual HDD??

That is what you get with closed systems. Anywho, back to my 1TB HDD with 6gb/s speed for just $99.

I didnt expect MS to change this.  Unfortunate.

I can now see why MS made USB flash drives compatible with the 360.  Old 360 and new 360 harddrives will not be compatible with each other so you can just you a thumb drive that you have laying around if you want to go over to a friends and not have to recover your account.

You guys do realize if you recover your gamertag all your data transfers, right? Or there's always the cable.....

Even savegames?

No.