How to shift the XBox 360: Open up the hard drive!

Earlier in the week it fell to me to buy my girlfriend an external hard drive for her Eee PC 901. She needed one for storing all those 'important' photographs she had taken over the years, and I wasn't going to get the chance to put Linux on her old laptop until those world-heritage-photographs were safe.

My first thought, after seeing the price of wireless external hard drives was an XBox 360. The Elite has 120 GB hard drive, plenty of room for a few photos, and with the September price drop it wasn't too much more. Unfortunately a bit of searching on the web showed that using an XBox was likely to require the physical copying of files onto a flash drive, and wasn't going to be an easy sell to my girlfriend. It seems to me that Microsoft are missing an angle on this one, yes you could get a lot larger external for your money, but how many people would take the compromise if the XBox just made the hard drive a little bit easier to use?

In the end I bought a 200 GB HandyDrive:

Yes I saved myself about £150, but I was disappointed nonetheless. Especially when the HandyDrive turned out to be faulty. Luckily, as there were no more 200 GB hard drives left, those nice chaps at Wolverhampton's Maplin's exchanged it for a 250 GB HandyDrive:

Photos courtesy of my girlfriend...the world can breath a sigh of relief that these, and others like them, are now safe.

nb. It is also worth noting that I was up until 4am this morning trying to get Ubuntu on the old laptop; it is still resolutely a Windows XP.