External Hardrive For Xbox 360

[redragon74]

im needing an external hardrive for my laptop cause its overloaded and giving me memory shutdown notices, and then i got to thinking, can you take and external hardrive and plug it into the USB ports on a 360 and use it as a 2nd harddrive?

 

[tlither]

Just did a search on google and yes you can. Some folks have used WD external USB drives and had the 360 recognize them right away. Just search for "360 external drive".

 

[redragon74]

sweet thats what im lookin at getting *a 320 gig* and i figure its moooore than enough so why not see if i can use it on my 360 to

 

[LastSpartan]

I tried with mine and it don't work. So be careful before buying a new one (or if you have one at home)

 

[redragon74]

well its morely needed for my laptop wich is at 15 ish percent memmory >< so even if i get it its needed for atleast one thing lol

 

[Gokussj5okazu]

Actually, very few extrenal HDDs can be used. Only those formatted in a way similiar to that of flash and jump drives will work. Standard, non-partitioned HDDs will not work. The 360 must recognize several MS firmware on the drive for it to be used that way, unless it's setup like a flash drive.

 

[tlither]

From everything I've found searching most of the WD external usb drives will work (passbook/etc). Not guaranteed by me but lots of folks seem to be using them.

 

[Dreadnought]

So this means we can store data AND play from it?

 

[xerocalibur]

So this means we can store data AND play from it?

From my personal experience, having used an external drive since December 2007...

No.

The external drives can only be used for media -- videos, pictures, music files -- most file formats supported by M$ will work -- this means no *.MOV or other Apple formats...
The Xbox will allow you to browse directories on the drive, and select appropriate files, and launch them on the console.

HOWEVER, you can NOT play games from the external drives, or save game data to them (gamesaves, DLC, etc).

You didn't think M$ would make it that easy, would you?

So yeah, the answer is yes and no, but if you're looking to just store media files from your PC on it, and launch them on your Xbox 360, it should work fine.

My external is a Western Digital Elements 500gb drive that Target had on sale on Black Friday in 2007, $89 plus tax. Good deal, no? Worked out of the box, too.

 

[AoBfrost]

For media and stuff, yes. For demo's and other games, no.

Most videos, and music, etc will work off a external HDD, but you cant play demos off a USB HDD on the 360.

 

[NoMercyJoe]

Just about any USB external hard drive you use will work fine. Some are formatted in Fat32, others are not. You need to format it to a Fat32 file system. If you have Windows XP for Vista, you can format a drive up to 32 GB. In Windows 98, it's up to 127 or something. To format something higher, you need something like Partition Magic, do a google search for it. The fat 32 file system can support a drive bigger than a TB, so, I think it's safe to say you'll be set with what ever size drive you get. The downside is the fact that you can't actually save anything from Marketplace or anything else from the console on it. Basically, you put all your media on it from your computer, and then you can view it on your 360.

Uhh..have fun?

-Joe

 

[AoBfrost]

Partition magic is your best friend, it will format anything into fat32 no matter the size. All it does it make a million 32 gig partitions, but joins them into 1 so the entire HDD is fat32 and only 1 partition. It works great on my ps2 when I use it to play AVI files from my Western digital HDD.

 

[HaloFreakX]

sweet thats what im lookin at getting *a 320 gig* and i figure its moooore than enough so why not see if i can use it on my 360 to

If you've got a BestBuy or something near by you can buy a external hard drive for about $160 for a 500 gig, but at my local electronics store it's a Micro Center. There's is $100. External Hard drive