Come April 6th, there will be much to rejoice about for Xbox 360 owners as we finally get support for USB drives.

It was announced today that the April 6th console update for the Xbox 360 will finally allow you to use the USB drive of your choice for storing game saves, demos, profiles and more.  While you will have option of using an external hard drive, the announcement does stress that flash-based devices will be the better option.

You will need to configure any device you plug into the Xbox, or you can wait until May when SanDisk will release pre-configured thumb drives you can use right out of the package without having to do anything.  Any thumb drive you choose to use will have to be a minimum of 1 GB, and you can have two thumb drives connected at any time for up to a maximum of 32 GB of storage.

This is a welcome addition to the console as no one really thrilled to the Microsoft produced memory units that only had 512 MBs of storage, meaning they weren’t even capable of storing most game demos.  This will greatly free up space on crowded hard drives, or if you choose to go for the Arcade version of the console which does not come with a hard drive, this could be a much cheaper alternative for saving game data.

Thumb Drive prices are constantly dropping, and this is something Microsoft has needed to do for some time now.  It will also give you the option of properly backing up your data in case of a hard drive crash.

We can’t wait for April 6th now!