Xbox 360’s hard drive

Is the Xbox 360’s hard drive really a valuable extension of the system, vital to your experience, or is it more like the PS2’s hard drive, which was expensive and virtually ignored by every game besides Final Fantasy? 

The original Xbox shipped with a standard 8 to 10 gigabyte hard drive, and it was used by the system for such things as caching, which substantially speeds up load times, and the storage of saves and downloadable content. The same reasons seem to apply to the Xbox 360 hard drive as well. But let’s look at this a little more carefully – how many features will you use, and what should you care about?