Xbox 360: A digital forensic investigation of the hard disk drive

In recent years an increase in the complexity of games has subsequently demanded an upscale of the hardware in the consoles required to run them. It is not uncommon for games consoles to now feature many pieces of hardware similar to those found in a standard personal computer.In terms of forensics the most significant inclusion in today's games consoles is the storage media, whether they are flash based memory cards, or electro-mechanical hard disk drives. When combined with networks, particularly the internet, this inbuilt storage gives games consoles a host of new features, including the downloading of games, updating of console software/firmware, streaming media from different network locations, activities centred around social networking and usually involving user specific content being saved on the consoles storage media.This paper will look at analyzing the SATA hard disk drive contained in Microsoft's Xbox 360 games console. We present our findings and provide suggested basic guidelines for future investigations to be able to recover stored remnants of information from the drive.