There's four 360's: The arcade (used to be called core), pro, halo edition, and elite.

Arcade: In short, waste of money. You get the core system, and a wire controller. No hard drive, but a memory card that's loaded to the brink with old arcade games. It costs 279.99, but if you want to download anything or play Xbox games you need the harddrive, which is 100 dollars.

Pro: The one most people go with. 20 Gig hard drive and wireless controller, as well as Forza Motorsport 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. What Chester was saying about the internals - the old processors used to be too hot and would cause the "red ring of death". Luckily they extended the warranty to 3 years for that problem, but on ALL of the new ones they have a new processor in it that hopefully won't cause that problem. 350 dollars.

Halo Limited Edition : Exacntly like the pro except it's all coloured (system and controller) in a Halo scheme and it comes with a plug and play kit to recharge the wireless controller. 400 dollars.

Elite : 120 Gig hard drive, coloured black. It's about the same as the pro other than those two things, and it comes with an HDMI cable. It's 450 dollars.

Most people get the Pro unless they're going to be doing A LOT of downloading, in which case they get the Elite.

 

There are certain laptop hadrives that you can get cheaper than 360's and be able to hook them up to your 360. It does require some little modifications but nothing big.

 

If the arcade one comes with a hard drive slot, just buy that and install your own hard drive.

 

The arcade does come with a slot for the hard drive, but the HDD costs 100 dollars, so if you get that you're spending 379.99 on your 360 that is just like a pro system. You end up spendig a lot more money

 

ya best to just go big one time and be done with it...LMFAO

id rather have MORE SPACE than i need then need more space and go have to buy a larger harddrive.... which ya can.... but for me PERSONALY black xbox goes well with everything!!!!! white just sticks out to much for my liking BUT thats what i have now. LMFAO eventualy ill upgrade to a elite cause im tired of always deleting old demos so i have room for new ones

 

What kind of hard drive does it use? New Egg and Tiger Direct sell hard drives online and for $100 I'm sure you can find a hard drive that has more capacity.

 

I'm not sure what HDD it uses.... that's not the problem though. It's fitting it into an inclosure and making it compatible with with the plug that the 360 uses. The ones I've seen are when people take their old HDD enclosure (for 360) and put a new HDD in that. So you end up buying a HDD anyways. As for the Elite, 20 gigs is MORE than enough unless you're downloading mass ammounts of things from Xbox Live. So, you're pretty much you're paying 100 dollars for more than needed space, a black paint job, and HDMI cables.

 

The 360 doesn't allow you to backup, restore, and format the hard drive? I backed up, formatted, and restored the hard drive like 4 times since I've have my PS3. HDMI cables cost like $3 from Amazon.

 

What are you using to back it up? You can connect it to your PC, which I'm sure would mean you could rip it on to an external hard drive. But you don't really need to, Xbox Live keeps all of your downloads, so if you lose your HDD or have to get it replaced you can just redownload everything you had for free.

 

There are ways to backup you 360 hdd content, not as simple as the ps3 though. Like I mention before, there are only certain laptop hardrive that can be installed on the 360, the reason is that a new firmware had to be developed and the people who developed it, only made it for certain hdd's.