I'm gonna go ahead and second getting a newer 360, you can get them for $200. Probably less if they are used, but they're much better than the old version of the 360s. Sure you only get a 4GB hard drive, but that's no big deal if you have some USB sticks/external hard drives.

Even using cheaper external HDDs you get shafted because you can only use 16GB of the storage space no matter how big it is.

This isn't a USB flash drive. Its an actual HDD. Like the MS brand but a third party and yes, you can use all of the space on it. I have about 40GB used up on it right now.

Instead of dishing out $300 for a new Xbox. Dish out $250 for a new PS3.

FYI NEVER buy a used console EVER.

I would recommend against it, too many people mod their xboxs in ways they shouldn't be that you should either buy new or from a reputable used store

buy one for like 100 at a non name brand game store. also make sure you get the jist of their return policy cause the first xbox i bought broke 7 times before they finally replaced it with my current one.

someone posted that they had a SSD hooked up to their console. if you HAVE to use a console then that would be the route. watching my friends play and my time playing demon souls i have to say that console loading times are ridiculous. an SSD would make it significantly faster. the only bottleneck would be the primitive GPU and antique CPU.

Whatever you do, do not get the first gen. I'm sure you can find a newer one for around 100-150.

Refurbished is even worse than used, unless you buy a warranty (which usually makes it just as expensive as buying new), since it means that at some point it WAS broken and some one opened it up and messed around with it until they thought they had fixed it.

That's weird, I've tried it with a 1TB external HDD before and it only let me use a portion of it. Even googling now everything says there is a 16GB limit per device whether HDD or flash drive unless something has changed recently, it has been a while since I've used it though.