Recent reports have speculated that technology giant Microsoft could be in the process of preparing to support third-party USB storage for saving and loading game information and data. As has been revealed in what is supposedly a Microsoft engineering document, the new capability would be made available for the Xbox 360 gaming console as well, sometime this spring.

Instead of providing the traditional storage cards which are flash-based, the latest update would allow USB hard drives to be utilized as storage options. There is, however, one thing that needs to be kept in mind, although many USB hard drives are provided to customers with capacity points of over 16GB, Microsoft would only be allowing a partition of 16Gbytes on size in this case, along with 512MB of that used for system data.

Reports are that gamers can employ the use of up-to 2 USB devices, for a total of 32GB storage space.

Rumor has it that users will be provided with two options - they can either pick a "Configure Now" option on a 250GB hard-drive and format the drive as an Xbox partition, transforming the drive into 16GB of usable storage, or they can try the "customize" option and partition out the said 16GB, using the remainder as storage space.