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Xbox 360 and USB Hard Drives are the best thing together since Peanut Butter and Chocolate
Last week I was thinking about why would someone with an 20-Gig hard drive on their Xbox 360 want to spend a hundred and eighty bucks on one of the new larger Xbox 120 Gig hard drives. Sure you can download every game demo, Xbox Live Arcade Game, get some TV shows off Xbox Live but the high definition movie rentals take forever to download and you can only watch them for one day before they disintegrate in a cloud of DRM smoke. I could see considering getting an Xbox 360 Elite if I didn't already have an Xbox 360.
But the big issue is the fact that the Xbox 360 is specifically designed to be a completely walled closed garden of data. With the exception of using one of your own JPEGs as a theme back ground there is no way to get your own data files onto the Xbox 360 hard drive. You can download data from Xbox live and you can watch digital video files such as MP4, h264, WMV that are streamed over a network, stored on a DVD, or on a USB drive but there is no way to get your own video content that you have rolled onto and your Xbox hard drive. The same goes for digital music files. You can stream them and play them off a drive but the only way to get your music to remain on the hard drive is to actually rip a CD in the Xbox 360 and that just seams so 2001ish. Since a corrupted save game file was one of the ways to crack the Xbox one and install Linux on it it is understandable that Microsoft remains rather paranoid about Microsoft non-blessed user data on the 360 hard drive.
After the Xbox Spring 07 Update I can watch MPEG 4 videos that I ripped and compressed for my PSP and iPod on the Xbox 360 and that is pretty cool and it was the main feature that I looked forward to on the update.
Now I have a soft spot in my heart for external hard drives. When I was in high-school I had an external 40 meg SCSI drive that I used all through out school and I actually took it to school with me and over to my friend's place since we all had Macs. So I have an 80 Gig external HD that I was using as a back up drive for my iBook, and a 320 Gig USB/Firewire hard drive. Last week I did a test and loaded up the external 80 gig drive with music, pictures and tried it out connect to the 360. One awesome thing is that the 360 had no problem with the Mac formatted disks since they added iPod support to the 360.
Now supposedly I can always stream music and photos over my network to my 360 using Connect 360 but the problem with that is that I have to have my notebook hooked up and booted up to do that. Then the spring update hit that added my two favorite video formats and they updated Connect 360 to support the new formats and software. However really large mp4 files don't stream at all from Connect 360 and that is a shame considering I have a Wifi-G network and bandwidth should not be an issue.
One of my biggest complaints about the 360 Spring update is that it can't play videos off an iPod that is connected to the 360. I tried it with both my 5th Gen iPod and my iPod Mini in disk mode. It was all non DRMed video in the proper file format but the 360 was not trying hard enough to see it. However the same video files worked off USB storage devices like my HDs and SD Card reader. I betcha they added support to play videos off a Zune but not the iPod. That sucks since I can use the iPod for audio podcasts and music on the 360 but not video.
For all of last week I had my eye on a 500 gig external drive made by LaCie. It was a bargain since it was a factory reconditioned drive for $150. That is over three gigs of data for a buck. I had a good experience with my reconditioned DVD+RW drive from LaCie and my old trusty 40 meg SCSI drive was made by them back in the day. So I ordered the 500 Gig drive on Friday and I was pleasantly surprised to see it delivered on Monday.
I formatted the drive and transfered all the data my 320 Gig drive to it, and then wiped my 80 Gig drive and loaded it with a fresh backup of my laptop. Then I took my 320 gig drive and took off all the files that my 360 can't play with the exception of all the DRMed version of tracks and shows from the iTunes music store. However a vast majority of my video files are ones that I ripped and compressed myself and they look pretty good as long as I use TV resolution instead of iPod screen resolution. I also got an used Xbox 360 media remote control for ten bucks from a used game store. So now that my external 320 Gig Hard drive is loaded up with some of my favorite movies, TV shows and music I can use my 360 as a multimedia video juke box and it was a lot cheaper than getting an Apple TV or a dedicated Windows Media Center PC. When I have some new content for the hard drive I can plug my iBook into it and load it on the external HD for the 360.
Yeah I know this is super dorky and it is not for everyone but it is just enough multimedia convergence to keep me entertained and happy.
Jake at May 15, 2007 
Games
Comments
connect360 has been update to fix the streaming problem talked about above. The new version is 3.1
Posted by: Scott Willliams at May 26, 2007 11:00 AM
Thank you for the information.
Posted by: anthony at August 24, 2007 5:46 PM
I tried the same thing... but the 360 but I can't get my 360 to recgonize anything over 200gigs. Did you format NTFS?
Posted by: Anonymous at October 1, 2007 5:13 PM
it has to be FAT32 formatted. i have a 500gig external western digital hd connected to the xbox360. unfortunately, FAT32 doesn't support files larger than 4gigs :( so i can't transfer wmv-hd files to
Posted by: Anonymous at November 21, 2007 3:11 PM
Thanks for posting this! I'm sitting on the couch, looking at my 5th gen iPod hanging off my 360 and wondering why it won't see the video. And I'm testing Connect360.
After reading this I think I'll look at an external drive solution... thanks for the info.
Posted by: Doug at November 24, 2007 2:35 PM
Wow, I have the same LaCie HD (NTFS right now) and an xbox 360. I DO have a Media Center PC, Vista Ultimate, for which my xbox is a MCE. It seems even after the Fall 2007 update , I still can't play divx/xvid files from Vista. Are things that f#@$%d or am I still missing something?
Posted by: John at December 12, 2007 8:11 AM
since xbox is compatible with the ipod now, can i format the hd with my mac, and how many gb will i be able to use?
Posted by: randy at December 27, 2007 11:28 PM
I also have a 500 GB Western Digital External Hard Drive. I am able to get my 360 to recognize it when it is partitioned as FAT32, but not as a NTFS partition. This upsets me because I am unable to move large files onto the FAT while I can with the NTFS. Also, since I formated the drive to NTFS, I am unable to use Disk Managment to convert back to FAT32. Do you know of any freeware available or any Microsoft fix?
Posted by: Nate at January 24, 2008 4:23 AM
FAT32 will only allow 4GB max file size and you can download partion magic or even one from like seagate they have their own tool I think every major manufactuer will have their own disk management tool.
Posted by: Steven at February 2, 2008 12:47 PM
You can use Partition Magic, Its a linux kernal that allows you to alter your disk setup, You can resize your harddrive or convert from fat32 to ntfs or any version of linux without formatting.
You can find it on Download.com
Posted by: ProdigyQnZ at February 13, 2008 8:29 PM
How does the 360 know that the iPod is an iPod when formatted?
Why the would it be blocked when it's formatted as a hard drive?
There has to be a way to get around this.
Posted by: adrian at March 19, 2008 12:47 PM
I have a 500GB USB external Hard Drive that works on my Xbox 360.
It simply plugged the HDD in and worked, no formatting or mucking about.
It is excellent I have all my movies, music and tv shows on it.
I have posted an article about it on my blog here:
http://marketingasolicitor.com/?p=121
Posted by: 500GB Xbox USB External Hard Drive that actually works! at March 28, 2008 7:37 AM
