It appears that Microsoft has let the cat out of the bag that the 250GB Hard Drive Upgrade will be coming to North American Xbox 360 owners soon. Previously, the elusive 250GB hard drive had only been available in the North American market as part of the recent Special or Limited Edition console offerings. It had, however, been available in Japan for separate purchase.

A new ad titled “Make More Room for Entertainment” that can be seen on Xbox dashboards suggests that you can add more hard drive space by buying the 250GB hard drive upgrade kit from your local retailer. We have checked with several of our retail contacts and all of them tell us that they have no information yet on a 250GB Xbox 360 hard drive upgrade kit. One of them, however, says that they have been told by corporate that they should expect some sort of an announcement on the replacement of the current 120GB hard drive upgrade soon.

This dashboard ad does seem to be the confirmation that we have been waiting for to know for sure that Microsoft is planning to release the 250GB hard drive for sale separately in the North American market. Originally, our sources had claimed that they expected an official announcement by Microsoft at E3, but it looks as if it might actually come a bit sooner than that.

We expect the pricing to be more than the current 120GB hard drive to start with, so we estimate that it will cost as little as $130, but not much more than that.

In the meantime, if you can no longer wait, there are those that are importing the 250GB hard drive from Japan and selling them here in the North American market. This is an option that you can consider, but we suggest that you wait if you can, as it would appear that it will not be much longer.