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...that Microsoft's Xbox 360 *still* has not been exploited? PS3 has had a number of exploits over the years, but Xbox 360 is still locked down tight. Too bad desktop Windows still has remote code execution vulnerabilities discovered every month...

Probably an economic issue. Microsoft (and Sony, for that matter) doesn't make money from console hardware sales ... they need game sales to make a profit. So there's a clear incentive to make the Xbox hard to crack. Perhaps Microsoft is just better at that than Sony.

Have either of you actually played a video game before? Where do you get your intel from?

The 360 was the first to have a hypervisor exploit: http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEZkykVkkFmojzapEq.php
The 360 was the first to allow playing burnt games: http://digg.com/news/technology/Modded_Xbox_360_Plays_Burned_Games
The 360 was the first to have homebrew: http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Xbox_360_King_Kong_Shader_Exploit

WHOA THERE COWBOY!!! Anyone considering this would do well to note that the product number of the drive you linked and the drive needed for this hack are NOT THE SAME and you will fail if you use the model that ends in BEVT. The BEVS version is no longer produced, hard to find, and has an inflated price as a result of this known procedure.

That's really interesting considering the reviews (several) to the right of the Newegg BEVT product read:

xbox 360

white Reviewed By: Nick on 9/2/2009
Rating + 5
Tech Level Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Purchased this device to upgrade the capacity of my 360. I now have a 120GB 360 drive for a fraction the cost of a ms one.
Cons: none
Other Thoughts: You must be experienced with computers to use this drive for the 360. (Not just plug and play)

Although I have not done this myself (I don't own an XBox360) I know of people that have done it successfully with the BEVT and there are posts online of successes.

I would be really surprised if the firmware didn't work for the BEVT the same way it does for the BEVS. I think the inflated price of the BEVS is simply because they don't make them anymore. Not a hardware guy but I'd be surprised if Microsoft's latest XBoxes aren't shipping with later drives like the BEVT.

Isn't that exactly what they're doing here? Locking out unauthorized storage.

I understand what you're saying but I do not know how they would do this. I'm not a hardware guy but what I do know of firmware is that if you're making this drive look like the correct corresponding WD1200BEV drive firmware-wise ... how will the XBox360 know the difference? I assume these firmware dumps are binary dumps from actual Microsoft licensed drives so while I'm not saying it's impossible, it would sure be impressive if they can pull that off. Because I imagine it would have to disable a lot of valid drives unless they took care to sign each unique drive and (on top of that) have a way to validate it against a server. I heavily doubt they would go to that lengths to prevent such a small portion of the population from saving money on an upgrade.

I would say this is a very safe alternative.

with the limited number of write cycles with the SSD in some models, you want to avoid any unnecessary writes

I've heard this said often, but the only time I've seen any actual numbers crunched, the conclusion was that it wasn't worth worrying about:

With the Eee PC SSD, a typical user (6 hours/day, 10% write rate) will write for 36 minutes per day resulting in a useful lifespan of ~25 years in the worst assumed case [only 50% effective wear levelling, 100k writes to a sector before failure].

Besides, even if that wasn't the case, one of the things about the Eeepc is its moddability -- back up often (which you should be doing anyway), and then if/when the SSD drive goes, swap it for a new one. It'll also probably be a nice upgrade over the smallish original, given the speed that SSD drives are improving in capacity and speed.

With iPhones around and people desperately clinging to the clamshells of their ancient Psions and fixing the Eee's missing features by eerily advanced DIY, when will Asus et al. finally look/listen/learn?