Microsoft has a little surprise in store for those using USB Flash drives for storage on their Xbox 360 consoles. With the latest update, Microsoft has doubled the allowed size of USB flash drives from 16GB to 32GB.

The news of the capacity increase came as more users have been getting the latest dashboard update. Previously, even if you had a larger flash drive than 16GB, the Xbox 360 would only allow users to use 16GB of the available storage space.

The storage increase comes as Microsoft confirms that Halo 4 will require 8GB of available storage space. The capacity increase will help those users that have opted not to go with a hard drive, but instead have taken advantage of the cheap prices of USB flash drive storage for handling their storage needs. Some users have reported using multiple USB flash drives and are pleased with the option, as it is still cheaper in most cases than buying a hard drive for use with their Xbox 360.

While the price of 32GB USB flash drives isn’t as cheap as 16GB flash drives yet, 32GB USB flash drives are now under $20, and we see the price going a bit lower as many makers are moving to USB 3.0 drives; which is making for great deals on the older and slower USB 2.0 models. Since the Xbox 360 does not support USB 3.0, there is no gain in buying a USB 3.0 model. With two 32GB drives, users have more storage than the 60GB hard drive that appeared in the Xbox 360 for a short time prior to the company moving away from both the 20GB and 60GB models in favor of the 120GB drive, which became the standard for a long time.