I have a external hard drive with 360 games on it i plug in to play them on my 360 but it...

You have to have an external hard drive plug in. It does not have to be 360 just reformat it. External hard drives that plug in the USB are not recognized as a hard drive for the 360.

Hi,

You only really need an official Xbox 360 Slim hard drive if:

• The game insists on using an internal 360 hard drive. There are a select few 360 games that need to install some data from the disc to run, these games need an internal drive.
  
• You still want to play original Xbox games.
  

For almost all other Xbox 360 games you can install to a external hard drive via a USB cable. The Xbox 360 supports external drives up to 2TB. If you connect an standard external hard drive via USB you can just move the game or saves to the external drive.

Unless your Xbox 360 drive is official, you won't be able to play original Xbox games. Most drives are not official. Any official hard drive will be quite old now as Microsoft hasn't made these drives for nearly a decade.

I have an old Xbox 360 I use occasionally for games that are either not BC on the Xbox One/Series X or were never released on PC. I use a 1TB external hard drive. I also want to insure that my Xbox 360s old DVD drive will continue to work into the future, so I install my 360 disc games to the 1TB drive.

EVERY old gen xbox game that came out before the 360 has ALWAYS required a hard drive to play them on the 360 as the hard drive contains the emulation software that allows the older games to play on the 360. it is your only option using a flash drive or
an external NON MS brand drive will not work, only the drive that goes with your 360 model (external clip on for the fat, internal for the slim etc).

So, do you mean that I will have to plug in my external hard drive, then move the games to the internal SSD to play them?

I am wondering if I can use a hard drive I removed from a old regular xbox externally on my 360. My goal is to play the old regular xbox games. It is said that you just need a hard drive to play the games. So can I hookup that drive I took out of the regular
xbox and use it externally with my 360???