What are the advantages of having a HD in a Xbox 360?

The save games and profiles are small, and if you’re not using Live you could probably do without it. Although you can save your music and other content to a HD to play through the console while gaming, I don’t really think it’s particularly useful if you have a hi-fi or some speakers.

Shame, if you’re not on Live, you ain’t livin’.
I say go for live, you’ll thank me later ;)

If for some reason you don’t have access to an ethernet port, or some other reason, then you probably are good without the HD.

If you’re not going live (even though you should) then a HDD is a waste of money. I pretty much use my HDD for gamedemos…

hard drive is a waste without Live. live allows the downloads which fills your HD

It’s not a waste, the HD is useful for saving games and it is required for backwards compatibility if you plan on playing any original Xbox games. Even if you don’t use the Xbox Live Gold for multiplayer, you can still use the free Xbox Live Silver to download games and movies, which requires the harddrive. There are also rumors that certain future Xbox games will require the HD just to play them.

If I were you, I would just go ahead and get the HD. It’s not going to hurt you and you only save like 50 bucks from not getting it. (Plus you get a wired controller instead of the wireless bundled in)

The thing is that I plan on getting a chipped version to play backup games when I’m not on Live. Chipped versions are not illegal in Denmark, but pirating of course is (I’m not going to pirate games). I have a choice between one without a HD for 560$ and a Elite version for 930$, so that’s 370$ for bascially a nicer color (black), a wireless controller and a HD (both come with a 2 year warranty even though they’re chipped, which explain the rather steep prices).

As I understand it no games utilize the HD for caching etc. for now, which makes it a rather expensive proposition. But then again using Live might prove to be fun. I’m having quite a hard time making up my mind :-)

Jbor, you should probably go with the cheaper model, and then buy the HDD attachment yourself. You may just want to stick with the 20Gb ones if they’re still being sold (perhaps used… I bought my HDD used). Like they said above, you’ll need it if you’re playing regular Xbox games, and I imagine in the future some games will need to cache from the HDD too. It’s worth the price of a used HDD.

It won’t matter which version you get if you’re going to mod it because any modded xbox 360 gets a lifetime ban from xbox live as soon as you connect it. You should just go with the cheaper one.

If it’s chipped the original firmware in the DVD drive won’t be touched, and nothing should be able to get detected when on Live (when using an original game).

I have however read one theory suggesting, that homeburnt DVD’s take a bit longer to read, and that the kernel might gather this information and send it to Live when you log on.

Any further info on the subject is most welcome :-)