Will a 3rd party 500GB hard drive work with a non modified xbox 360?

It`s entirely your own choice. Although it has been quite well known for some 3rd party HDDs not to be fully compatible with certain downloads.

Official Microsoft hard drive for the slim come in 250gb and 320gb sizes. Since there is no official 120gb hard drives available for the slim, one must assume that you either modified an old Xbox 360 hard drive or you purchased a 3rd party drive. Whichever
it is, it sounds like your hard drive may be failing. 3rd party or modified hard drive means there is nothing we can really do here in the forums to help. If you have another hard drive you could always give that a try.

What specific Xbox 360 console do you own? Do you have an official Xbox 360 hard drive attached? In order to play Original Xbox games on Xbox 360, you need a console with an official Xbox 360 hard drive since the software required is stored on the hard drives
themselves. 3rd party hard drives or non-official Xbox 360 hard drives will not work.

Hope this helps!

3rd party hds wont get you baned unless Its been modified to llook likely and xbox hds

If It is a non modified hds you can use 16gigs of It thats It

This is why usb drives are more useful then hds

3rd party hds dont always meet the read write requirements of xbox for usb storage

You can only used a 3rd party hd without issues as usb drives If It has a decent controller

Using 3rd party hds as xbox hds many result in a Consoles ban

Hello,

Do you have an original Xbox 360 hard drive? If you've purchased one from a 3rd party retailer like eBay or Amazon Marketplace and it didn't come in the official Microsoft packaging then it's likely to be the cause of the issue.

Only original Xbox 360 hard drives can play original Xbox games. The 3rd party hard drives do not possess the emulation files (and there's no way to download them) to play these original Xbox games. The 3rd party hard drives work with normal Xbox 360 games.