Microsoft to offer discounted Hard drive to 360 owners

Hot on the heels of the recent price drop on the Xbox 360; MS is now offering either a refurbished 20 GB hard drive or a 512 mb memory card to customers who originally purchased the old core system. This has since been upgraded to the package that includes a memory card but you can still get a hard drive on the cheap for the newer release as well.

From what I saw on avsforum.com, the breakdown appears to be:

Core system owners have two choices
1. 512 MB memory card for free or;
2. 20 GB hard drive for 20.00

Arcade system owners can only get the hard drive but it comes with a 3 month gold LIVE membership for $29.00
The reason for this is that MS is upgrading the console interface which is a mandatory update (at least if you sign onto LIVE) and this update requires 128 MB of space.

so basically for 230.00 you can have a fully functional 360 with some decent storage to boot.
not a bad deal for those who are either looking for a backup or just want to join the party.

link to the avs thread: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1075257
link to MS website about the program: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/hardware/memoryupdate/default.htm