The steady flux of good RPG's to the Xbox 360, has made me really want to buy one. I've been looking at the Xbox 360 Arcade , mainly because it is dead cheap and even though my current situation doesn't allow me to play console games in HD, this one does have a port if the need should ever arise.

I've pondering a bit over the lack of a hard drive though. Does a lot of 360 games make use of the hard drive to increase general performance and decrease loading time, or is it purely for downloading content from Xbox Live and such? If it makes a major difference when it comes to playing games, I might as well go Pro.

So the hard drive is purely for download content and doesn't increase system performance in anyway? At the moment, I am not too fussed about being able to download videos, save music, and whatnot.

If you dont have a harddrive youll need to buy a memory card to save all your games. Getting a 360 without a harddrive is just a waste of money.

and imnot sure but i dont even think they sell the 360s harddriveless anymore because no one buys them

The Arcade comes with a 256MB memory unit as far as I remember, so save games shouldn't be a problem. As I said, what I really want to know is how/if the hard drive affects the system performance in any major way.

k then, yup it still runs smoothly without the harddrive

The Xbox 360 20 GB hard drive does affect system performance. With it, your games will run more smoothly and load time will be reduced.

So yeah, definitely get a hard drive. Even if it didn't affect system performance, it's worth it.

That's what I suspected. Thanks for clearing that up, I will definitely go for the 20GB version then.