For those with an Xbox 360 who do not already know...

[mm3]

...that you can use your own External Hard Drive with it!

That's right, if you don't know already, you can use a USB external hard drive (formatted to FAT32) on your Xbox 360!

I've ran out of room on my 160GB Hard Drive that's actually attached to my Xbox already, so I just simply hooked up my external.

I hooked up a 20GB (easier to format to FAT32, IMO) external, and left the 160GB attached to my machine. Now, I just transferred all my game saves and Xbox/gaming-related data to the 20GB, and left Movies, Music, photos, etc on the 160GB. Perfect setup!!

Any hard drive that is formatted to FAT32 and is USB will work.

Figured others, like me with this problem, could use this tip, so I posed it here.

Happy gaming

 

[Corri]

mm3 you can use almost ANY usb device thats plug and pray with a 360

 

[mm3]

that may be true, but, a lot of drives nowadays are formatted to to the NTFS filesystem, not FAT32, of which I not able to get NTFS working with the 360.

 

[Ben]

You can plug well at the very least most smaller drives into a windows machine and format them to fat32. I would say any hard drive, but on the big hard drives you might run into issues... i would look into it before trying it with a large hdd.
Alright i looked it up the drive size limit for fat32 is 8 terabytes so i guess thats prolly not an issue.

 

[mm3]

Formatting the drive is easy. Knowing what to format it as was the tricky part

 

[IncompleteDude]

Did you also know that you can write computer programs for your XBox 360 using XNA?

See here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-ca/directx/bb219592.aspx
And here: http://creators.xna.com/

 

[ayanna]

mm3 you can use almost ANY usb device thats plug and pray with a 360

I know it was a typo (at least I presume it was) but it was still highly amusing "plug and pray" instead of "plug and play"

Ah, well, I don't even own an X-Box so it's all gobbledygook to me.

You know, I never even checked to see what if my external harddrive is FAT or NTFS...*runs off to check that*

 

[mm3]

there is a difference between FAT and FAT32 (and FAT16 for that matter). FAT is commonly used on small devices, such as pen drives or flash drives, and floppy disks.

FAT16 is an old MS-DOS filesystem and rarely surfaces anymore.

FAT32 was the standard for Windows XP when most hard drives in those days we're less than 32GB, or 128GB. Sometime after SP1, Microsoft pushed the use of NTFS, for more stability among other things.

 

[recovery]

I mainly use NTFS on windows systems not only is it better for windows than Fat32. It also gets around the annoying 4GB file problem. With NTFS, I haven't bumped into such a limit yet!

I mainly use FAT systems on USB pens and partitions I want a majority of systems, Linux, bsd etc... to read.

 

[mm3]

4GB? I thought it was a 6GB limit?

Either way, it doesn't really matter, I don't have any reason to have any files over 4GB nor 6GB on my 360. A movie is only around a gig.

 

[Mr Alex]

FAT32 Ass.

Why did no one tell me of all the things my box could do?

 

[Kams]

You can use any format HDD with a PS3, I've plugged in my Mac OS formated HDD's and they've worked fine, so I would imagine that a FAT32 formatted HDD would work just as well.

 

[mm3]

the HFS filesystem is supported by the PS3, I've tried it with the one downstairs.

But, ZFS and Ext2 did not work for me.

 

[Kams]

the HFS filesystem....But, ZFS and Ext2...

uh...wha?

 

[Sawaa]

ZFS and Ext2 are generally used for Unix-like operating systems, Kams

 

[Kams]

Thanks for the clarification! Mac OS X is Unix based right? So maybe that's what it uses?

 

[Sawaa]

Mac OSX *is* Unix-based, that's right. But it uses HFS/HFS+, in order to retain disc compatibility with previous versions of the OS (System 9, for example).

 

[Kams]

Gotcha :wink:

 

[Corri]

I know it was a typo (at least I presume it was) but it was still highly amusing "plug and pray" instead of "plug and play"

Nope, thats not a typo.

 

[mm3]

You know what sucks? You can't save game data to the external. All USB devices are read only