After letting slip the date and price of the stand-alone Xbox 360 250GB hard drive, GameStop has once again come out ahead of Microsoft to let the public know when and how much a new product is coming out. This time, it is the Xbox 360 branded USB flash drives.
GameStop has listings for both an 8GB and a 16GB Xbox 360 USB flash drives. The 8GB has a $39.99 price and the 16GB has a $69.90 price. Both are listed with a ship date of April 6 which runs counter to Microsoft's claims that they won't be coming until May.
A quick search at online retailers NewEgg and Amazon reveals 16GB USB flash drives going as cheap as $28.50 without a rebate. So why the big price difference? The GameStop listing says that the Xbox 360 branded USB flash drive is pre-configured to work with the Xbox 360 and comes with one month free of Xbox Live Gold. The Gold subscription is worth $4.17 while the steps documented to configure USB flash drives with the Xbox 360 look like a no-brainer.
Our suggestion (barring this being incorrect information from GameStop), skip the Xbox 360 branded USB flash drives and just find the cheapest quality drive you can get if you don't have one already when the update comes on April 6. Any USB storage device 1GB or larger is supposed to work and is easily configured in Xbox 360 menus. Just remember that you can configure only a maximum of 16GB for use with the Xbox 360 and can use only two USB storage devices at the same time.
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