THE GAME IS AFOOT in Xbox land this week, as Microsoft has just launched a massive external hard drive this week for its Xbox 360 and those Xbox 360 slim rumours won't go away.

The Xbox 360 Hard Drive is the biggest external hard drive to date for salivating Xbox 360 fanbois. They can now save up to 250GB of contraband content on its digital synapses and it comes with a data transfer kit. This means punters can migrate their media more easily on to another hard drive. Microsoft has also preloaded some HD game demos, videos, and Xbox Live Arcade game trials.

The drive comes amongst some excellent engineering rumour mill activity. We first reported a couple of weeks ago that a new slim jim Xbox 360 could be forthcoming. The Vole's Mountain View research facility posted a job opening seeking mainboard designers for its console development team after his Ballmerness said the company is developing designs for its next games console.

Now adding grist the mill is a source leak at Kotaku that has as image shot of a new Xbox 360 design sucking its belly in thanks to a combined CPU and GPU on a single chip. Apparently the leak is rumoured to the result of beta testing in China. µ