Moore: Hard Drive 'Killed' Original Xbox, Forced Microsoft to Prematurely Abandon Platform
"The hard drive in every Xbox killed us," Moore, now the president of EA Sports, told Guardian. "We were still selling it at $199 and the hard drive was like $70. That's why we prematurely left the original Xbox, because the more we were selling--there was still great demand--it was killing us, and there was no way to bring the price down."
The original Xbox, which debuted in 2001, was replaced only four years after launch when the Xbox 360 arrived in 2005. Xbox 360 units can be bought with or without hard drives, and owners are able to buy larger hard drives from Microsoft, something that wasn't feasible with the original Xbox as the HDD was internal.
"We determined at around the 25 million unit mark that we just needed to slow this thing down and just not sell any more, and move to the 360 as quickly as we possibly could," Moore explained.
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Schnapple
replyI've heard that the issue with the Xbox 1 hard drive was that it was like 8GB or something which in 2000 or so when they thought of the idea was a decent bit of space. As time went on, hard drive capacities grow exponentially but for whatever reason they have to keep the hard drive capacity the same, meaning they need to keep putting 8GB hard drives in these things and it actually becomes *more* expensive to have some hard drive maker keep supplying you 8GB hard drives when the norm becomes 100GB drives and so fortth.
I don't understand though why they didn't just quietly put bigger hard drives in the thing. Maybe just with an 8GB useable partition.-
This is what I've heard as well.
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They did start doing that to a limited extent I believe, but the problem is those bigger hard drives still cost you about the same. The cost of hard drives is dictated by the physical costs of the components - how much the platters, motors and electronics are. That doesn't really change depending on the capacity (unless that involves more platters).
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I don't understand though why they didn't just quietly put bigger hard drives in the thing. Maybe just with an 8GB useable partition.
They did exactly that. The Xbox came with either an 8 or 10 GB hard drive, and both were formatted to 8 GB. Wikipedia says so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox-
Right but what I was on the impression happened was that they had to lay out more than the average tiny hard drive in order to keep a small size.
So for example, let's say in 2003 the cheapest smallest hard drive was $50 for a 20GB, and the 8GB hard drives were $70, why not just put in the cheapest smallest thing you can find?
I guess his complaint was that the cheapest smallest thing never went down in price.
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Yeah but, what would be the big deal of including a 40 or 100gb drive that would cost less than an 8gb drive and partition it to fool the xbox at 8GB. Unless it's an IDE controller issue, LBA48 or whatever. Something tells me the failure rate of the drives has something to do with it. It's a good thing they switched to 2.5s.
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They did move to bigger hard disks, but they had two problems, for one they wanted to maintain 100% compatibility with all models and they were also mindful of a value sense with every XBox they had already sold. If a new XBox showed up with a larger hard disk how would everybody who had spent the same amount or more with a smaller disk feel? So, they limited the space that each disk formatted with. This kept them the same. Additionally, they were not actually getting lower prices on the larger hard disks, it was still just the smallest disk that they could purchase on a contract from Seagate, Western Digital, or whoever, larger than last year's model, but at the same or nearly the same price.
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They did move to bigger screens, but they had two problems, for one they wanted to maintain 100% compatibility with all models and they were also mindful of a value sense with every television they had already sold. If a new television showed up with a larger screen how would everybody who had spent the same amount or more with a smaller screen feel? . changed that a little to make a point.
It happens with EVERY technology out there, no reason not to have just put a different drive in to reduce costs. The reality is that they wanted to beat everyone else to market with the "next gen".
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