You do not need to modify the fw of your hdd to use the softmod. It should work just fine with any 5400 RPM hdd, it does not need to be an official X360 hdd. You do have to modify some data on the drive but it won't stop it from working on an unmodded console...

I'm still waiting for a 2.5" 7200 RPM hdd to come in to test with before I can confirm if they'll work as well. Right now SSDs are 100% a no go. The exploit targets a race condition between when the HDD is issued a read command and when it replies...

And SSDs are way too fast in replying to exploit the race condition. It is possible to modify the firmware of certain SSDs (or HDDs for that matter) to delay the response time for the specific sector the exploit abuses, however...

I don't think releasing tools to do this is really beneficial for the world, and I don't really want to invest anymore time debugging hdds/ssds if I don't have to.

For the softmod I implemented a number of safety measures to ensure you can always boot the stock OS and recover should anything go wrong (I'm looking at you people who replaced the boot animation with an unsigned xex...)

There's also a couple homebrew features I'm incorporating into it, you'll be able to fully customize the boot animation (without breaking the console), etc. Still no ETA for release, there's more work and testing that needs to be done, I don't need additional testers at this time