On April 6th, we will be releasing a system update over Xbox LIVE for your Xbox 360 that will allow USB flash drives to be used for storing profiles, game saves, demos and more.  I’ve been testing this feature out for a few weeks, and I have to say it’s really great. Once you take the system update on April 6th, you’ll be able to connect your USB flash drives to your console and head over to the memory section to configure your new storage device. Once you do that, the system will conduct a one time performance and integrity check to confirm the drive is working properly. You will then be able to configure how much storage to use on the device, up to 16 GB. The remaining space on the flash drive will be accessible by your PC or Mac. USB Hard drives may work, but like flash memory, you’ll only be able to use up to 16GB of space. Since performance on flash based USB storage is usually better, I highly recommend using flash based instead of spinning media like a hard drive…it’s just going to give you a MUCH better experience.



We’ve also enhanced the memory management functions, so you’ll be able to have better control on what you want to copy or move between storage devices.



A couple of points:

    * You can have 2 devices connected to the console at a time, enabling up to 32GB of simultaneous storage.
    * The system won’t just configure the device once it is connected to the console. You’ll need to head to the memory area in system settings, select your USB Device, and choose from Configure Now (Format and Configure the Full Device), or Customize (you can choose how much memory you want configured for Xbox360 from the free space on the device.)

While any flash drive can be used, we are partnering with SanDisk to release an Xbox 360 branded USB flash drive in May that comes pre-configured out of the box and ready to go. I’ll provide links to those drives once they’re available. Until then, starting April 6th (when we release the system update) you can pop any flash drive over 1GB into your Xbox 360 and configure it as storage.

so in other words, the USB Flash Drive now is gonna work like the previous Memory card?

While we are all disappointed that we can't use our 1TB hard drives (most likely due to security and also the fact that they want to keep selling the hard drives) The consolation is that 16GB is a pretty good chunk of storage for games and stuff, at the very least we can copy disc to the USB drive, so the USB drive can always be used to accelarate the latest game we've got.

And of course, we can merge 2 drives into one 32GB chunk. So it's not too bad. Not like we are able to download or rent movies here anyway.

you mean if we have 2x 16gb flash drive, it is able to become a 32gb chunk ? so that we can actually store installed game there? or was it a split storage of 16gb/16gb ?

well anyway we have to test it out to see how much performance does it really give first.

Ok, I'm not so sure about the merge bit, cause they said you can use 2 16GB so in total got 32GB, wheter or not it's one continous chunk we're not sure.

As for the installing the game to the drive, that's confirmed by Major Nelson already. We can't copy the games we have from the HDD currently to the USB, but we must just do a reinstall to the USB again.

Wouldn't it be slow to read the games from USB hdd?

i love microsoft...
after i bought 256mb memory unit..

now can used flash drive

the usb port is USB 2.0, it should work flawlessly.

I can smell your anger. hahaha
USB2.0 throughput is slower than XSATA of the HDD...

guess it's something like ReadyBoost for Windows to speedup the system memory usage.

But reading/loading faster than Dvd-rom, right ??
Now 16G pendrive still around RM100+, i think better top-up rm30+ to get 160G hardisk.