Usb powered external drive for 360 ?

yoshytoshy

Has anyone used an external usb drive ,with the xbox ?
Not sure what one to get or if I can get a large size.

Thanks.

Keith186

Yeah I've used it for watching movies and playing music but not for saving stuff to. Apparently you can save games or profiles to a usb key but I'm not so sure about an external hard drive.
If your just using it for movies I'd recommend a western digital one. I've never had a problem with mine. Think theres a 250 gb one going for 40 odd quid. Check bargain alerts forum, seen it yesterday.

amacachi

You can use any drive, however the odds are it'll be formatted in NTFS. You can use this to format it to FAT32 which is what the 360 reads. Hope you have an operating system before Windows 7 though, yet to find a program to do it that works on Windows 7.

Adamcp898

Yeah if you're buying it for installing games, game saves and profile storage the xbox will only use 16GB of it

niall mc

A USB powered hard drive won't work, you'll need an external drive that is powered by the mains. (If you are talking about the 2.5" drives with 2 USB plugs)

This is what you can use to format the drive to FAT32.
Be careful, the drive may be a bit unstable so back it up or don't keep anything valuable on it. Also, when using it on a computer always use the 'Safely remove hardware' option.

To use the app on Windows 7 you'll have to use the XP compatability tool.

tman

niall mc wrote: »

A USB powered hard drive won't work, you'll need an external drive that is powered by the mains. (If you are talking about the 2.5" drives with 2 USB plugs)

Yes it will... I've had absolutely no problems using my WD passport on my 360 and PS3 (as soon as I formatted it to fat32 using swiss knife, of course...)
I'm not using one of those 2 plug cables either, just a bog standard mini usb cable.

J-blk

tman wrote: »

Yes it will... I've had absolutely no problems using my WD passport on my 360 and PS3 (as soon as I formatted it to fat32 using swiss knife, of course...)
I'm not using one of those 2 plug cables either, just a bog standard mini usb cable.

+1 - used various WD Passport models, no problems with them and they all worked fine off the single USB port.

Oddly enough, though NTFS isn't supported, HFS+ (standard Mac OS X file format) is () and it doesn't have the same file size limitations as FAT32. If you have a Mac, you're better off keeping the external drive as HFS+.

yoshytoshy

Thanks for the replies ,it was important to me that a usb powered drive worked with it. I have all my stuff hidden at the back of the tv ,so I don't want to have to plug a powerplug in all the time.

I want to use the drive for music ,so I'll probably me using it between laptop,pc ,xbox etc.

Cheers.

Evolute

Adamcp898 wrote: »

Yeah if you're buying it for installing games, game saves and profile storage the xbox will only use 16GB of it

If you have a new drive just make a few partitions on it and convert the partitions to fat32 thus giving you many seperate drives to use on the same HDD.

Jev/N

WD Passport or a Freecom Toughdrive?

yoshytoshy

It's only me again :eek: ,

Thanks for the advice and links ,got the wd 250gb from bargain alerts and have it working.
Just wondering what the crack is when the xbox is turned off ,the drive seems to be reading still ? White light is flashing slowly.
Do I need to plug out the Xbox ?

amacachi

yoshytoshy wrote: »

It's only me again :eek: ,

Thanks for the advice and links ,got the wd 250gb from bargain alerts and have it working.
Just wondering what the crack is when the xbox is turned off ,the drive seems to be reading still ? White light is flashing slowly.
Do I need to plug out the Xbox ?

Give it a few seconds after the Xbox is fully shut down and disconnect the power from the Hard Drive. Seems to randomly decide if it'll fully turn off or not.

yoshytoshy

It's a usb powered drive ,this is why I'm suprised about it.

I don't like plugging out my xbox in case it spikes when I plug it back in.

tman

Yeah, it still powers devices even if the xbox is turned off, can be fairly annoying. I usually just plug the drive into one of the front slots and unplug it a few secs after turning the console off

amacachi

yoshytoshy wrote: »

It's a usb powered drive ,this is why I'm suprised about it.

I don't like plugging out my xbox in case it spikes when I plug it back in.

Sorry, yeah, it's USB powered, forgot that. :pac: Just give it a few seconds after the XBox is shut down then take it out if you don't like having it "on" the whole time.