uh buddy all HDDs will fail after a certain time that's a scientific fact....they're mechanical devices and thus it's just the nature of the beast to fail. With their extensive testing they might be able to prevent some failures but I don't even know if it's possible. So yes it's possible they have slightly better HDDs.

edit: So far I haven't seen anyone complain about their HDD failing on them, I myself have gone through 2-3 hard drives good thing they have long ass warranties.

umm.

no

its not their Harddrives..

Microsoft does not make any harddrives..that's the point..they are standard 2.5 " PC harddrive's  that are in laptop's it's the  exact same Harddrive's

Someone is obviously manufacturing them for MS.  MS might be making those people do some more extensive quality testing on them.

Yeah Microsoft are third-party accessory nazis like that. No third-party accessories for you. Can you imagine if they tried to do this with Madcatz memory cards last generation? I'm surprised that this kind of thing (forcing the consumer to buy only first-party accessories) isn't illegal. This is why I have been saying that no one should ever bring up the Arcade when you want to talk about price advantages in the console war. The Arcade can't do diddly squat besides really barebones offline gaming without the expensive as hell accessories. If there are any Arcade-only (no hard drive add-on users or people who bought a second memory unit) users here who still get on by with just their original memory unit (the recent Jasper ones have the memory inside the console itself I think), let me know so I can correct myself. But seeing how space game saves take up for certain games, it seems inevitable that you'd run out eventually. Especially the Core users.

our acessories sell more because we force you to buy over expensive proprietary , lower quality accessories.

Oh, 120million more than nintendo and sony? making 50$/year per xbl customer makes me think ms is loosing more per 360 than we think they are. not to mention obscure prices on devices.

basically, microsoft is ripping us all off, not giving us a better experience than sony, forcing us to use inferior accessories, not including all of the services that the ps3 has, charging the same price and making us bend over backwards in the process.

why do you all hate sony again?

They are not banning all third party accessories, just ones that are not licensed.

Yep I called up MS turns out they hire these guys for the testing.

quality testing...ol brother.., just like the first 11 million xbox360's quality control?

I know you cannot see everything that can go wrong with a design, but on the same token

look i will give Microsoft the prop's when their due. but that statement he made is complete HOGWASH

it's the exact same harddrive that are in Laptop's, they have been made for year's they are already a industry standard part,

the only thing that make's them anything other than standard is the "Harddrive can" that they are in. which has a port on the Harddrive Can that connect's to the xbox360 and that port is unique to the xbox360.

^yes which is why I said I don't even know if it's possible. I've never seen their quality control methods or standards, or polls on 360 HDD failures. So yes it could be hogwash, or it could have an inkling of truth I think the point is neither of us know whether it yields results.

As for the NPD (North America) results, I don't think MS has anything to worry about. Things are stabilizing now. Week of Sept 27, 360 won because of ODST. Week of Oct 3, ODST died down so PS3 hovered a bit on top. Week of Oct 10, 360 hovered over PS3 as the slim 299 hype started to die down. Week of Oct 17, PS3 went ahead 25% or so because of Uncharted 2. I bet you the week after that, the 360 hovers over the PS3 again and sees a boost the week after that when Forza 3 hits (just like PS3 saw a boost with Uncharted 2). Right now everything is pretty much stabilized. The real worry for Microsoft is Europe/Others. They need a find a way to make the Xbox more appealing to Europe/Others. Even when the PS3 was more expensive, the PS3 was still winning in most European countries I think (except UK obviously). I don't know what's going on with Europe but MS needs to do something about that region.