Well, I guess I can chime in, Im a n00b and just learn from experience. My first 360 had a hitachi 47dj. Flashed with the most current firmware from the date of this post.
Though the guides help, A LOT of them are not clear that with the hitachi, you are pretty much screwed on making backups. Still convincing you that using the isobuster way will work. So I found the only possible way which was the wxripper way. It works, but man, I dont like it at all. Doesn't seem reliable, and having to have a dvd-rom ripped apart. And if you have CRC errors it just makes things confusing. And it just doesn't "feel" like a 1:1 copy.
At this point I had finally found out this was the only way if you had a hitachi drive, or get that samsung dvd-rom. If the following did not happen, I would have resulted in this. A little investment, for worry free backups.
Well then I ended up getting another 360 with a samsung ms25. I have so many options, but use textbook.pdf guide which said to use XBC. Simple program that seems to rip everything. It works great.
The unreliability of grabbing ss.bins with the hitachi, and the numerous things already stated on this site, just got me frustrated.
Again i'm a n00b, so this is just my experience from the first week of experimenting. Though the hitachi is a lot easier to flash.
This leads me back to the topic of the thread. Is XBC the best way to make a backup? As close as 1:1 as possible? Or is it better to use the isobuster/ss merger/dvdinfopro method?