There are probably a number of you out there that went ahead and bought their Xbox 360 without the hard drive in it and saved some dough, only to find out when you got home that your really probably did need that hard drive to keep you from starting over at the beginning of your game every time. The drive also is needed to have somewhere to download games and demos.

Your options were either to live with it, or get a 64MB memory unit to at least save some things. Well, Microsoft has heard your concerns and coming April 3rd they will be offering a $49.99 512MB memory unit for sale that will hold a lot less than the 20GB hard drive that would have cost you twice as much, but it’s better than nothing. It’s also better than the 64MB card when Xbox starts increasing the memory of their games beyond the cards capacity, such as “XBL Arcade” which will be increasing its size from 50MB to 150MB.

Crunchgear says it right when they said that you shouldn’t have bought the Xbox 360 if you could not afford the hard drive, but its a good thing that Microsoft is looking out for you. Due to the 512MB memory unit being priced at $50, the 64MB unit price will drop to $29.99 in April as well.

In addition, to help acclimate you to the Xbox LIVE arcade games (assuming you haven’t been taking advantage of them without the memory to do so), Microsoft is shipping the Xbox LIVE Arcade game “Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved” pre-installed on the 512MB memory unit for a limited time.

Reuters