A couple of days after users broke the ice by providing evidence that the new Xbox 360 Jasper revision has hit the stores, rumors began emerging as to a new feature of the Arcade version. New Jasper Arcade models seemed to come with 256 of internal flash storage.

As most users know, the Arcade version of the 360 only comes with a 256MB memory card, no hard drive. Or so was the case in the past. Now, users who buy a Jasper model will be hard pressed to find a memory unit in the package.

On December the 2'nd, Microsoft has officially announced that it has integrated a 256MB flash unit within the Arcade console. This makes the system ready to use right out of the box.

One of the reasons for this has to do with lowering costs (or in this case raising profits). The external memory unit used the same kind of flash memory that the new solution provides, but building an external enclosure and connector is more expensive than just having a chip welded on the motherboard. Also, users don't have to worry about misplacing the memory card.

However, there's a downside to this solution. By using external memory cards, the save-game data could be easily moved to other systems and if something happened to the user's console, their progress would remain intact when playing on another system.

Although the internal memory can be safely used for save game data, it is far better to acquire a HDD unit for your Xbox. The NXE (New Xbox Experience) released by Microsoft a couple of weeks ago represents a complete system update, providing some exciting new features like avatars, HD movie streaming and game installs. Xbox users can only take full advantage of these features if they've previously equipped their system with a hard drive.


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