Using External USB Hard Drive with Xbox 360

KrzyGreek · Mar 2, 2016

Hi everyone,

Recently, I bought a GDrive Mobile USB 1TB external hard drive to back up my Mac. I was excited when I realized that external hard drives / USBs also worked with the Xbox 360, because I have some media (ie TV shows and movies) that I backed up to the hard
drive. However, when I plug the hard drive into the Xbox, the drive doesn't show up under the xbox media player, and when checking the storage devices, the hard drive shows up as "Unformatted" and the only option I can choose is to Format it. I really don't
want to format the external hard drive and have to re-backup everything again. Is there any way to get the external hard drive to work (just for playing movies, not even for game storage or anything) on the Xbox 360 without reformatting it?

Thanks in advance for the help!

:)

The 4th Estate · Mar 2, 2016

External hard drive only

My official Xbox 360 internal hard drive is faulty. I was wondering if it would be OK to take it out and use an
external USB hard drive instead. Has anyone got any experience using only an external hard drive with an Xbox 360?

IsaacClarkeSNL · Mar 2, 2016

Corrupted DLC broke my xbox?

By external hard drive, I mean the one that snaps in the top, not a 3rd party one that connects via USB. I know using those 3rd party USB hard drives with the Xbox 360 are bothersome.

ExcaIibur · Mar 2, 2016

No. It has to be formatted so it can work and the last time I checked, it only works for backing up and saving games on. Not playing movies on etc...

CHAD TPRUITT · Mar 3, 2016

Yeah...it has to be formatted and when done can only be used for the 360. And to further killing the excitement is that, last I heard, the drive will be partitioned: you can only use I think 16 GBs. No matter if the drive is 4TB 16GBs is all you can use.

User 9242019 · Oct 31, 2018

The Xbox 360 supports up to 2TB external drives. They have to have the correct sector size however. Xbox 360 only supports 512Kb sectors and many drives today are formatted at 4K. Toshiba Canvio USB powered drives work well, some Seagates won't.

XBF Ezra G

Hi milad,

Thanks for your update. Something you could try is using a USB Storage Drive or External Hard Drive and installing the game to that, if it installs fine the, your hard drive could be damaged or malfunctioning. For more information on using external USB device
for the Xbox 360, check out:
Using USB Flash Drives as Xbox 360 Storage.

I hope this helps.

StuartATrueRed

Could your friend be talking about an external hard drive with an Xbox One. You can use an external usb 3.0 hard drive with that console, but you can only use external storage upto 32gb on an xbox 360.

Obsessive Power

You can use external storage for your console be it an external USB hard drive or a Flash drive. However you can only assign a maximum of 16GB for Xbox Storage.

http://support.xbox.com/xbox-360/accessories/usb-flash-drive

RandyAU93

Xbox 360 consoles can use USB-powered external hard drives up to 2TB in size.

H-F Hum

I'm gonna be more specific: the game doesn't accept installation on external storage. Whether it's flash drive or external hard drive, the game isn't meant to install on external storage connected through USB just like Need for Speed Rivals on Xbox 360.
You need to install it on an internal hard drive (media hard drive). The link I provided to you aren't external hard drives; they're internal hard drives for the Xbox 360:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-360/accessories/harddrives

Using External USB Hard Drive with Xbox 360