$ 200 external HD-DVD drive for Xbox 360

The external HD-DVD drive made for the Xbox 360 will hit store shelves before Christmas.

In order to maintain continuous interest, Microsoft reveals new bits of information every week about what exactly are the minor modifications, novelties, "surprises" with which it wants to make its Xbox 360 console even more attractive compared to competing game consoles (Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii ) with the approach of publication.

According to DigiTimes, citing Taiwanese sources, an external HD-DVD drive that can be connected to the gaming device via USB 200 will be available for $ 2.0 this year, the Redmond's answer to Sony's PlayStation 3's built-in Blu-ray unit. With this, the battle for DVD-replacing formats also begins in the console market.

The optical unit, developed by Toshiba, uses the Xbox 360's three-core processor, a 3,2 GHz IBM CPU, to perform computational tasks when playing HD content, that is, to decode high-definition videos. As a reminder, single-layer HD-DVDs have a capacity of 15 gigabytes, while Blu-ray Discs have a capacity of 25 GB, but their production costs are also higher.