Bigger hard drive support coming to Xbox 360

With the Games With Gold freebie program approaching its second anniversary, hard drive size on the Xbox 360 is a monthly issue for many users. Support for larger capacity drives is on the way, and those in the Xbox 360 Preview Program can take advantage of it sooner.

The next update for the Xbox 360 Preview Program allows the use of drives up to 2 TB, Xbox community honcho Major Nelson said in an update this week. Furthermore, the update that delivers 2 TB support will no longer reserve space in advance on that drive. "If you are using 16 GB of hard drive space for games, we will only take 16 GB of space." Heh, that's cute. Who uses just 16 GB of space?

The ability to use two external drives also remains standard with this change when it arrives. Major Nelson said the update will come to the general public later this year.

For preview members, "some drives may be incompatible or have performance issues." Also, "If you already have space reserved for storing Xbox 360 data, you will need to clear the Xbox 360 storage to gain full access to the drive."

The Preview Program for Xbox 360 was announced last month. Preview invitations were sent out to a select group at that time; they're not taking requests or sign-ups. Updates to the Xbox 360 will also focus on "improving the ability to troubleshoot common network issues from the 360 and adding a Network Connectivity test including Download and Upload speed tests."