The Xbox One, which was announced earlier today, is going to be shipping with a 500GB hard drive built in. What Microsoft didn't mention, but confirmed with Engadget, is that system owners will no longer be able to remove, replace, or service the hard drive.

The reason why Xbox 360 owners could not use third party hard disks was because of a sector on the disk known as the "security sector" or "security blob" which is signed by Microsoft with a private key would be invalid. Disks could possibly be encrypted this time around with a unique per-box key, similar to how keyvaults worked.

If Microsoft did choose to encrypt the hard drive, that would mean it would be more difficult to obtain game files since every game must be installed to the hard disk. Sony has proven with the PS3 that disk encryption adds very little to no noticeable latency when performing I/O operations.

With all of the cloud integration into the Xbox One it is really not surprising that the HDD is not removable. In their talk with Albert Penello, Engadget also confirmed that removable media will be supported for expanding storage on the Xbox One. What hasn't been confirmed though is whether or not it will work similar to the Xbox 360's expandable storage in that only FAT32-formatted devices can be utilized.

It can be assumed though that most modern file systems such as NTFS and the FAT variants will be supported on the Xbox One. If Microsoft also wants full control over the management of their files, they will again take the Xbox 360 approach by creating files with the chosen capacity, and writing their own file system layer on top of that.

Posted: May 21, 2013 8:15 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum