There's no way to manufacture a legitimate 3rd party hard drive for the system since it's more than just a hard drive, it contains things such as a unique serial number that is required if it's going to be recognized by the 360. There's no way for a 3rd party to provide that on a new hard drive without violating copyright law.
However, there's no shortage of unofficial hard drives for the Xbox 360. They pretty much look just like official units though, so the vast majority of those that have purchased a knock-off are unaware it isn't official. Most really good deals that you'll find on something like a 250 gig HD on a site like Ebay are these knockoffs.
And that's precisely why they're never going to ban systems based on duplicate hard drive serial numbers (Pirates will buy an official flash drive and copy the contents on to their new hard drives, so there can be thousands of hard drives out there with the same unique identity). Banning those systems for all sharing the same hard drive identity would just punish unsuspecting consumers that thought they were buying a legitimate accessory and drive them away from the 360.
onlysublime, on Sun Nov 27, 2011 4:31 PM, said:
even though you'll get a warning that your flash drive is too slow for the Xbox, it will work
I had an extremely cheap flash drive that I wanted to use to do something on my 360 that required removing my hard drive (I had an issue with an achievement and the most recent patch for Grid and had to do this to workaround that so I could delete patch 3, which broke the achievement, so I'd be able to legitimately win that achievement). It failed the test and simply wouldn't work as a 360 storage device. So that's not necessarily true.
Ended up having to format a Sandisk memory stick instead for it. Still haven't figured out how to reformat that for normal PC use. Someday, I'll figure out how to do it...
Edited by Atariboy, Mon Nov 28, 2011 5:43 PM.