Over the past couple of days several of our sources have been telling us that the latest run of Xbox 360 Jasper units received a bump in the built-in flash memory from 256MB to 512MB. When we received this report in the middle of last week, we were unable to confirm it, but now we can tell you that for certain Xbox 360 Jasper Arcade units in the wild are showing up with 512MB of flash memory in them.

So far we have not been able to confirm that these Xbox 360 Jasper Arcade units have hit the North American shores, but owners outside of North America are reporting consoles from the April 2009 9th manufacturing run seem to be the first units that include the flash memory upgrade.

To this point Microsoft has not made an official announcement, but we do suspect that the change has to do with a couple of things. The biggest is that with the push forward on downloadable content, the need for more storage continues to be an issue with users that purchase the Arcade model; and in addition, users lose almost 16MB for necessary operating system and related content files, which makes things a bit tight with only 256MB. In addition, with the move by Samsung to the 4gbit NAND flash it is just likely that it was offered to Microsoft at the same price or less because the company prefers not to manufacture the smaller capacity as users are looking for larger capacities.

We expect to see an official announcement at some point in the near future when the 360 Jasper Arcade with the 512MB of flash memory are in wider availability and inventories of the older units with only 256MB are cleared off dealer shelves. In the meantime we are looking at ways that you will be able to identify the units with the upgraded flash memory without taking the unit out of the box.